Merter Sualp's Weblog

To increase the productivity with my Macbook, I decided to buy a side mount clip. Ten 1 Design has a solution. So I wanted to give it a try.

The package contains the main clip, a very small but enough user guide, 5 rubberized grips and a pair of 3M fine tuning fits. The grips are in different height and these make the mountie as customizable as possible. I tried Macbook 2015, iPad Mini 2 and iPhone 6S Plus. It works but how?

The two symmetric parts of the clip are simple rotating plastics. Their job is to release and lock the grips on the sides of the monitors. You must be very careful not to break them since all parts are plastic.

There are 5 grips named as A, B, E, D, F, in increasing height. The first three are mainly for tablets and phones. D and F are for thinner laptop screens. Any Macbook will do fine. To my knowledge, using the clips with iMacs and first four iPad generations is not possible. For my case, the recommended set consists of F for the MacBook 2015 and B for iPad mini / iPhone 6S Plus.

The clips hold the devices at both sides quite well. So well that a little deformation on the upper right corner of my Macbook 2015 occurred.

That location may be the weakest construction point on the lid of Macbook, I do not know, but keep an eye for those kind of deficiencies. I lowered the height by using D in place of F but it does not hold as powerful as F. There is no such problem on the other side of the clip. My iPad and iPhone are ok.

For iPad mini, both portrait and landscape positioning worked. However there are a few problems. First, the bezel of Macbook 2015 is thinner than the front side of the clip. Not to lose any screen estate, I clipped it at the very right corner of the lid. For the same reason, I clipped mountie to the upper left corner of the iPad. This setup totally prevents us to link devices with a lightning-USB cable. Hence, I rotated iPad 180 degrees. As you can see, the Lightning port looks upwards. I only used the Duet app and it works this way. But there may be apps which do not like to rotate that much.

In the landscape mode, the same problem persists. Moreover, the only possible orientation renders the on/off switch useless. You need to move iPad upward. That puts us into another problematic situation. Since Macbook 2015 is too light, the added weight of iPad tries to rotate the laptop when you lower the lid after a certain angle. Also, the keyboard moves up and the whole system rests on the lower back end of the lid.

This occurs regardless of the orientation. Only at a very certain angle can you use the laptop-tablet combo, which is really annoying.

After the simple usage model, I decided to land the Macbook on a Rain Design mStand. With this use case, I got an entirely different result. The problems aforementioned both gone because the center of mass of the Macbook – iPad Mini is now just perpendicular to the table. It cannot exert enough of a force to rotate the laptop.

I am planning to test mountie with other Macbooks. To be frank, I do not recommend the product to Macbook 2015 users because of the aforementioned problems. This setup should have worked without a stand because the main idea is to increase the productivity while preserving mobility. The stand takes the mobility away.

Tags: mountie, ten1design

This entry was posted on 27/12/2015 at 23:15 and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.