On bumper cases
Does anyone remember bumper cases? For phones, or laptops? Steve Jobs offered them for free to iPhone 4 purchasers during the Antennagate debacle. I suppose you can still find them if you look but it seems their popularity peaked at that time.
I guess this post is a bit of an addendum to my previous post on rubber bumpers. I’d be using a bumper case right now on my M5 MacBook Air, but I have yet to find one on the market.
By bumper case, I mean a case that only covers a laptop's edges while leaving the rest open to the air. On a machine like a MacBook that relies on a metal body for heat dispersion - especially one without a fan - this is ideal, as it opens up as much surface area as possible to radiate heat while still protecting the edges of the machine - the most likely areas for it to get bumped or hit. The problem of heat dispersion is less of an issue on a phone, but for most phone drops, impact occurs on the edge of the device, so it’s the primary place you need protection. Ultimately, this case form factor is ideal for both classes of device. And yet I never really see them anymore!
From my perspective as a MacBook user over the years, the only bumper cases I'm even aware of were the Thule Vectros series from the early 2010s, and a similar (knock-off...?) case from a brand called i-Blason who made one for the 2019 16" MacBook Pro (the model where they added back a physical ESC key next to the touch bar). I've had multiple MacBook Pros over the years, including one from 2015 and one from 2019, so I've had opportunities to use both of these cases. Aside from the thermal advantages, they have an incredibly beautiful design! I especially love the nice, chunky, exaggerated chamfer, which reminds me of those seen on 80s machines like the original Macintosh and the Apple II.
The main downside of these cases is they can be a bit cheap. The clips that hold them to your MacBook tend to wear out over time, especially on the i-Blason case - I went through four of them over a period of six years. I'm not going to say I would or wouldn't recommend them... again, there really wasn't much in the way of alternatives.
At this point I'm still looking around for a good laptop bumper case. The problem with everything I've seen is that even cases with lots of padding around the edges still have a non-removable piece of plastic covering up the bottom of the laptop. Why can't manufacturers make more thoughtfully designed cases? Make bumper cases popular again!