Windows Ten(t)
THIS ISN’T A COLUMN I ever planned on writing. I’ve never had the grand dream of making my computer look like a ski lodge. And yet, here I am writing it, because my laptop now has more of a rustic vibe to it than any technology should have in 2019.
My Microsoft Surface Laptop 2 is now covered in wood paneling. And y’know what? I like it. Maybe this is the first step on a journey that ends with me moving to a cabin decked out with a bear skin rug and hunting trophies. If that happens you have permission to track me down and kill me. Seriously: use this post as mitigation if it goes to trial. You have my blessing.
Anyway, that’s the destination – the wooden laptop, not my eventual murder. How did I get there?
The Surface Laptop in happier times. The proximity of the world's most underwhelming Eggs Benedict was an early warning sign, to be fair.
I blame Microsoft. And Plex. Microsoft, Plex and a curry sauce, in that order. Every ingredient in this sad story, except me, naturally. It doesn’t take a genius to join the dots between these, but I’ll spell it out for you anyway. Curry sauce has a tendency to spit when heated, and the Surface has a beautiful, but wholly impractical, alcantara cover.
I can’t stay mad at the curry – it was a solid example of the paneer korma genre – but it left some unsightly yellow dots across the fabric, like my Surface laptop was cosplaying as Spotty Man from SuperTed, but got the detail slightly wrong.
If you ever find yourself in this situation, don’t do what I did next: don’t try and scrub it out with soap and water, as you’ll replace that faint yellow dotting with a horrible brown patch instead.
The kind of brown patch that will have your colleagues wondering if freelance life is treating you so badly that you can't afford to wash your hands any more.
Microsoft would tell you that Surface care is easy for even the dirtiest of grubster. The official guidance is to clean the Alcantara "with a mild soap and water solution" within 30 minutes to "prevent any stains from setting." Fair enough, I didn't notice the dotting for a day, but the number of people with stained Surfaces on Reddit suggests I'm not the only person to find the computer not hugely practical for cleaning. I tried some fancy Alcantara cleaning products aimed at luxury car interiors. I tried diluted bleach. I tried nail polish remover. Nada.
You would have thought that Microsoft would see this coming and make the fabric easy to replace. They don't. In fact, iFixIt gave the Surface Laptop and its sequel an impressively bad 0/10 for repairability, calling it a "glue-filled monstrosity" that "literally can't be opened without destroying it."
So what's a little more glue? I began to research Surface Laptop covers, because using it in public was beginning to make me sad, as I imagined everyone nearby judging by gross palms. But the curse of Alcantara is just beginning: most places I found that sold covers would only cover up the top and bottom of the laptop, presumably because fabric repels adhesive.
Step forward the geniuses at ToastMade: a company that sprung into life via Kickstarter, narrowly clearing its target by just $368 in 2012. After some searching, it became clear that the company would bury my curry stain beneath a thin veneer of wood, and I got in touch.
The business specialises in wood and leather covers for devices. Actual wood, cut ridiculously thin, so as not to add extra heft. Despite this, its environmental credentials are pretty solid, running on 100 per cent renewable energy, and only using "responsibly grown, rainforest friendly wood and bamboo." Obviously shipping a laptop cover from Oregon to Mitcham isn't a great boon for the planet, but that's on me, not Toast.
A couple of weeks after making contact, my cover arrived, and I set to work affixing it, piece by piece, to the sullied Surface. It came in 10 pieces to cover almost every bit of exposed metal. The curved corner pieces are notched, so they bend easily without looking too angular.
Each piece has been laser cut to exactly fit the laptop or phone you order for, so there's no risk of getting things wrong. As somebody who has never, ever put on a screen protector without an unsightly bubble ruining my day, the Toast process was pretty painless. I only lined up one piece slightly incorrectly - the lid - and it exposes a tiny bit of metal at the back. But considering the metal grill behind it needs to be open anyway, it's hardly the end of the world.
It was all done within about 20 minutes, and despite my initial doubts, I really like it. So have most others who have seen it. Not everyone though:
Maybe public reactions are best saved for another day, but I can tell you one thing: I'd rather be judged as a hipster wazzock than somebody who doesn't understand why they put soap next to sinks.
Though I guess the two aren't mutually exclusive, if history repeats itself. No more Surface Laptop in the kitchen. This post originally appeared on The Inquirer, which heartbreakingly closed in December 2019, losing a huge amount of my best work in the process. Given it's all been scrubbed from the internet - aside from on the all-seeing eye of the Way Back Machine - there doesn't seem much harm in reposting this feature here for posterity.