Everything on my desk, and why it's still there

"What's your setup?" is the most common question I get and the one I'm worst at answering, because the honest answer is that it accumulated over six years and about a third of it is there by accident rather than decision.

So here's the audited version: everything currently on the desk, sorted by how much I'd fight to keep it.

#The things I'd replace immediately if they broke

The keyboard. Reviewed in full here — 8.5/10, and the hot-swap sockets are the reason I stopped buying keyboards. If it died tomorrow I'd order the same one before the end of the day.

The microphone. Everything on the channel goes through it. As I've argued at length, audio is where a small channel wins or loses viewers, and this is the cheapest single thing that makes a video sound professional rather than homemade. Non-negotiable.

The monitor. 27 inches at 1440p is, to me, the resolution-and-size sweet spot — high enough pixel density that text is comfortable without OS scaling, large enough for two files side by side, fast enough at 165 Hz that games feel right. I've used 4K at this size and spent the whole time fighting scaling settings.

#The things that quietly earn their place

The mouse. Sub-60g wireless. I was sceptical that weight mattered until I used a light one for a month and then picked up my old one, which felt like dragging a brick across the desk. Battery genuinely lasts a working week.

The portable SSD. Boring and important. All raw footage lands here and gets edited directly off it, which removes an entire copy step from every video I make. The time saved over a year is measured in days.

The headphones. Open-back, flat response. Flat matters because it means what I mix sounds the same on other people's speakers. Open-back matters because I can wear them for six hours without my ears getting hot. They're bad on a train and irrelevant to me because they never leave the desk.

#What I got wrong

Two purchases I'd take back, in the interest of the corrections policy:

I bought a camera before I fixed my audio. Covered in the streaming guide, but it belongs in any honest gear list. It was a good camera and it solved a problem I did not have, while the problem I did have — a room with hard walls — went unfixed for another eight months.

I bought an expensive chair too early. Not because the chair is bad; it's excellent. But I bought it while still working at a desk that was the wrong height, and a good chair at a bad desk is a worse experience than a mediocre chair at a correct one. Measure your desk height first. It costs nothing.

#The full list

Everything below is on the gear page, which is the version I keep updated. This post is a snapshot; that page is the source of truth.

A note on the links: they're affiliate links, they're marked, and they cost you nothing extra. They also don't influence this list — the two items I criticised above have affiliate links too, and I still told you not to repeat my mistake.