Not just a Mac stand, the Twelve South BookArc Flex aims to hold up most laptops with ease, helping you to reclaim your desk once again.
Whether you work from home or an actual office, there’s a good chance you’ve realised that space on your desk can be one of those rare things you need more and more of. Glance down and you may find space for anything but a keyboard, mouse, and your laptop is a rarity.
Depending on how big your workspace is and how you’ve arranged your desk, you may find a laptop takes up a good chunk of it because it sits open, with an extra monitor alongside. You’re probably still using an extra keyboard and mouse, because stretching your hands and arms over a desk to use the keyboard and mouse on your laptop is hardly ergonomically friendly or even comfortable. And yet still, you may not have the desk set up the way you want.
There are clearly things you can do to organise it, and a desk mat may help you get some of the way there, particularly if it includes some charging technology built in. The same is true for cables if your monitor includes a USB hub.
But one problem will almost always remain: somehow moving your laptop into a different position so it occupies less space.
While one option is to use extra furniture to stack up on your desk, such as a set of drawers with a little space for a laptop underneath, another could be to mount the laptop vertically, so that it only holds the rather slim bit of space on its side.
It’s an idea Twelve South has been toying with in its BookArc concept, an accessory and peripheral that provides a slot to stand a laptop up. Previously made for specific MacBook models, the latest generation has launched to handle quite a bit more, and closer to anything.
The BookArc Flex is a metal stand that supports up to 16 inch laptops measuring up to 2.54cm thick (1 inch), making it suitable for quite a few laptops, including the most recent 16 inch MacBook Pro and even going back to the first 16 inch model from a few years ago. It’ll also handle 13 inch MacBook Air models and even a Microsoft Surface Laptop, and given those laptop requirements, should play nicely with other similarly sized notebooks, as well.
The idea is simple enough: insert the closed laptop vertically into the stand, and a flexible base should see the two metal rods of the BookArc Flex stand tighten up against the laptop and press against it, holding it in place. That’ll close the laptop and give it the most minimal footprint, but you’ll still need to plug in your cable to keep it charged and connected to a monitor, so it stays on and usable.
However, the space on your desk is what the BookArc Flex is all about, keeping the design slim and even possibly colour matched to a laptop, with white, black, and chrome versions available.
The idea is still roughly the same as the original BookArc, but rather than need specific inserts to hold specific laptops, the Flex is designed to handle more laptops with ease. In fact, it’s not terribly out of kilter from some of the other space-saving gadgets Twelve South makes, such as the HiRise 3 Deluxe, which collapses several charging stands into one small space.
In Australia, you can expect the Twelve South BookArc Flex to be priced at $79.95 when it arrives in the coming months.
