Yes, that Severance. The one all your friends can’t stop talking about. The show that, along with White Lotus, has brought back an echo of the water cooler moments that pre-streaming television was known for. That’s impressive for Apple TV, which has been hemorrhaging money, but I digress.
Many eyes have gone googly at the building in which the series takes place, the fictional Lumon Industries. The New York Times even called the filming location, the real Bell Labs, the breakout star of the show.
Now Apple has gotten in on the act. They just listed the Lumon Terminal Pro on their website alongside the MacBooks and iMacs. It’s beautiful, neo-retro, and I want one. You want it, too. I can tell. The bad news? You can’t have it. Apple is just using it as a prop to nudge us into an Apple TV+ subscription.
too cool for us
Given that much of Severance takes place in a never-ending office environment, nailing the look of the computers was top of mind for the show’s props department. They used vintage computers and modified them to play a supporting role as the Lumon Industries’ employees’ computer terminals.
The Data General D2 from the late 1970s was one such computer, and it’s not hard at all to draw a thick, bolded line of inspiration from it to Apple’s Lumon Terminal Pro. How hard would we have to beg Apple to make one? I doubt it’d ever happen, given that Apple’s not in the habit of creating limited-run supply chains for anything.
But perhaps someone out there would create a Linux terminal that takes inspiration from it. One can dream, right? You can check out a behind-the-scenes video of how Severance was edited, but a warning for you: there are spoilers for season two.
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