| Cult of Mac

Best docks to cradle your iPhone 8 or iPhone X

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8_Roundup_Docks
Your new iPhone deserves a dock that's equally as beautiful.
Photo: Grovemade/Cult of Mac

Apple’s new iPhones are its most beautiful yet. And as such, they deserve to be docked in nothing but the finest cradles ever crafted.

Find the perfect dock can be a bit of challenge considering there are a dizzying array of options to choose from. Not all docks are created equal though, so we’ve rounded up the best options for users of all budgets.

These are the docks you should buy:

Got wood? You will after checking out this Macintosh replica

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wooden-mac-gold
A wooden Macintosh with gold keys? Yes please.
Photo: Love Hultén

Love Hultén has created a beautiful replica of the original 128k Macintosh made almost entirely out of American walnut. Known for his craftsmanship in building replicas and concepts of gaming consoles among other gadgets, Hultén has taken that love and applied it to one of Apple’s most beloved products to date. He calls it the Golden Apple.

Class Up Your Workspace With These Elegant Wooden Lap Desks [Gallery]

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Elephant not included.
Elephant not included.

I’m always on the lookout for some nice accoutrements to make my working day a bit more delightful, and as an Apple fan, the better something looks and works, the more I want it.

Take these sweet Macbook lap desks and iMac risers–made of walnut and oak with a birch core–from Danish design firm Nordic Appeal: they’re light, super functional and as elegant looking as I’ve ever seen.

Ergonomically, it’s useful to bring your Mac screen to about eye level, and having these little risers and wedges will certainly help you do that, no matter what desk, coffee shop table or lap you ultimately do your work on.

Monolith Makes Your iPhone Look Like It Belongs To Don Draper [Review]

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Monolith got teak in my iPhone, bless 'em.
Monolith got teak in my iPhone, bless 'em.

One of the saddest things about tech is that unlike other fashionable things, the aesthetic trend that might dictate what gadgets look like for a few years never gets a chance to come back into style. The most we ever get is the chance to be nostalgic about the look of an old gadget, not to fall in love with the aesthetic behind its design all over again, as if new.

For example, debatably thanks to AMC’s period drama Mad Men, Danish mid-century design has really come back into style. A whole new generation of people have come to discover and love a design trend that a mere two years ago, all but a few people would have, at best, only known by a couple musty old relics collecting dust and mouldering in their grandparents’ garage. Watching Don Draper slip into an Eames lounge chair, or pour himself a drink from a gorgeous teak sideboard, or turn on a tulip lamp designed by Eero Sarinen, though, rejuvenates these items by allowing us to see them as they were meant to be used and experienced. It removes real, living objects from the obscurity of textbooks and turns them into fresh ideas, ready to be used again.

It’s for this reason that I love seeing wood in a gadget. It takes a trend that was ubiquitous in the 70s and 80s, when home electronics were big and bulky enough to be mostly considered a kind of furniture, and presents it as a refreshing anecdote to a modern trend in tech design that puts the emphasis on more impersonal and space-age materials like plastic and metal, silicon and glass.

For me, wood can imply an intimacy — a device is yours, it was made for you — that makes it a perfect material for a smartphone: a device that is, by definition, the gadget with which most of us have our most personal relationship. And while Apple understandably doesn’t make iPhones out of wood, I’m delighted that a company like Monolith does, by offering a stunning line of natural wood backs for the iPhone 4 and iPhone 4S that are as practical as they are beautiful.