The Third Option

Every time I open my laptop, two impulses fight for control. The first is to keep it perfect—pristine aluminum, no marks, the object exactly as it was designed to be. The second arrives about ten minutes later: cover the whole thing in stickers, the way every DJ and illustrator I’ve ever admired seems to do, turning their machine into a collage of wherever they’ve been and what they love. These two impulses are irreconcilable and I’ve never resolved them.

The Jolt Team out of San Francisco came up with a third option: a MacBook case called the Brik Case, its surface studded with LEGO-compatible nodes. LEGO bricks, on your laptop. Red, yellow, blue—whatever you’re feeling that morning. Their Kickstarter cleared thirty thousand dollars without much effort, which tells you this particular fantasy is more widely shared than I’d assumed.

There’s something very San Francisco about the whole idea—tech fetish and maker culture colliding into one overpriced object that lets you feel creative without committing to anything permanent. And yet. The Death Star built across the lid of a MacBook Pro in the back of a coffee shop is a flex so deeply absurd it comes back around to being admirable. Pew, pew, pew.