We are pleased to announce a one-time lowering of the price of the Talos™ Secure Workstation and all derivative machines! Owner controlled hardware is extremely important, and we hope this lowering of the retail price will help more people afford a Talos™ system.

We have reduced the price of all machines by $400.00. The new Talos™ mainboard cost is only $3,700, and is close to the advertised price from the pre-ordering phase earlier this year! If you’ve already placed an order, your order will be automatically updated to reflect the new pricing.

Why were we able to do this? To put it simply, Raptor Engineering is not your typical engineering company. The market conditions in the US have recently and quite unexpectedly shifted to favor our business model, and we are passing the resultant savings directly to you, our valued customers.

Unlike most US companies that send all design and manufacturing work overseas, at Raptor all design and manufacturing is done in the US using as few foreign components as possible. We have found that this is one of the best ways to ensure a high-quality, durable product while maintaining a rapid development cycle. All design is done completely in-house using our dedicated staff, and our designs are thoroughly tested to operate correctly in harsh environments before being released for production. Because the IBM silicon, specifically the CPU and memory buffers, are also manufactured in the US, the Talos™ mainboard is built in the US from mainly US components. This is not something you see every day, especially on high-end computing products!

Finally, a note of caution. Due to rapid acquisitions within the semiconductor industry, and the resultant lack of competition for certain types of semiconductor devices, there are several small but critical pieces of silicon in use on Talos™ that are not of US origin. To make matters worse, in the few cases where there is US competition for foreign silicon devices, the US variants are not libre-friendly. We will continue to monitor the market for libre-friendly, US-made replacements of these components for use in future iterations of the Talos™ machines. For now, Talos™ is as close as anyone can get to a fully "Made in the USA" computer that not only respects your freedom, but is competitive with high-end machines for serious development work.

If this price drop has made Talos™ even remotely more affordable for you or your organization, we urge that you pledge now to show your support for owner-controlled, performant computing. Much of the hardware and software world is watching this campaign to see if owner-controlled computing is only viable for retrocomputing enthusiasts using outdated software, or whether perhaps libre software and libre-friendly hardware can be combined to help create revolutionary new solutions for the whole world that don’t rely on proprietary hardware and software. Only you can make this happen, so even if you can’t afford a Talos™ mainboard, please contribute at the highest pledge level possible. We thank you for your support!