Twelve South, we thank you. From the bottom of our nerd hearts, we thank you. What, you may ask, causes us to gush so? Well, quite simply, you'll find out after the break. Yes, this product is that good. Really it is.
You know, being a Mac owner has its ups and downs. While the Apple aesthetic is mostly adored, sometimes it comes at the cost of... howshallwesayit.... usability? You know, like not being able to pop a spare battery into your iPhone easily, or simply replace the hard drive in your iMac without suction cups and fancy screwdrivers.
For some of us, we'd like to be able to use a second, or third, or fourth (!) hard drive with our iMacs and not have them dangle around the desk, annoying us with their presence. Enter, then, Twelve South's BackPack to the rescue!
No, thank you!
Opening up the stylish packaging provides us with our aluminum pieces which when put together will soon serve as a shelf, and five sets of inserts for the mounting. We at bighugenerd have tested the inserts with pretty much every Apple display/computer out there, from 20" onwards, and it works like a charm with them all.
So here's a 27" iMac. She's very pretty. So let's get a BackPack attached, shall we?
Putting the shelf together is a simple affair. Just slide the required insert (the instructions tell you which one you need) into the shelf, and attach them to the back of your iMac or Apple Display. You don't need to hand-screw the simple bracket very tightly, as gravity will do the rest: Because Apple stands get wider as they go down, just the weight of the shelf will prevent it from sliding down. Thank you, gravity! There's also no easy way to do damage to your aluminum stand, because the inserts are made of plastic and rest very gently on the aluminum. We likey!
So here's a BackPack attached. As you can see, it looks very sleek, has holes in it for air movement, and is just... smart!
And here we are with a Western Digital Studio 1TB Firewire 800 drive on the shelf. Still very smart!
But you know, just having one of these BackPacks isn't really enough. We need two, or... three?
Fantastic! With that said, the more eagle-eyed among you will notice there are no cables. Well, here we go with cables.
So you may be wondering what you see from the front, and we can tell you, and show you again:
Yep, there are three hard drives behind the iMac in this picture, and you never knew! We are sneaky little nerd monkeys!
Not a cable to be seen, not a hard-drive LED to be seen. Nothing. If your cables are a little messy back there, Twelve South does include a sweet little twisty-tie for your usage, but we found we didn't need to us it. Still, nice touch, Twelve South!
So What's to Like?
Gosh, where do we start? Simple to put together, well-machined aluminum, smart packing, inserts for every Apple display you can think of (and several you probably can't), clears up your desk, will hold up to 5 lbs weight, makes you forget it's even there.
So What's Not to Like?
It won't clean your dishes. Well, they weren't clean enough for me, anyway. And..., it's not a Ferrari? We really like Ferraris. Like, a lot.
Verdict:
One of our absolute favorite accessories for our iMac. We cannot heap enough praise on this device. It's with extreme ease that we award the Twelve South BackPack our first ever five-nerd score. Well done there!
Special thanks to Andrew and Bridget at Twelve South for sending us the extra BackPack so we could have three, because our two simply weren't enough!
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