Twelve South

Stylish HiRise Stand Elevates Laptops to the Ideal Height

There’s no shortage of stands for laptops, but we’ve never seen one as useful or beautiful as the HiRise for MacBook from Twelve South. The HiRise secures that gleaming laptop on the pedestal it deserves, with style and grace. The best part? It places the screen at a more comfortable height for your viewing pleasure, working with an external keyboard and mouse for a more desktop-like experience.

The brushed-aluminum HiRise fits an 11-inch MacBook Air, a 15-inch MacBook Pro and just about any other laptop on its sturdy platform. The stand positions the screen at a height that’s nearly level with your eyes, letting you keep your chin up for more commodious computing. Its V-shaped arms cradle your laptop without scratching it, and they’re grippy enough to keep it from slipping. And the stand’s Teflon-coated bottom lets you easily rotate the laptop to face the right direction.

It’s easy to adjust the height of the stand, too. We tested one here and noticed it’s easy to loosen the thumbscrew and move the stand’s platform up and down, as high as six inches. We even matched its height to a monitor sitting right next to it. Excellent.

At $69.99, the MacBook-matching HiRise premium stand isn’t cheap, but it looks great on the desktop. It’s a swanky accessory that would make a lovely gift.

HiRise for MacBook review

Twelve South already offers a solid range of MacBook accessories, including the BookArc, BookBook, SurfacePad and BassJump 2. HiRise for MacBook is the latest addition, hot on the heels of the HiRise for iMac stand. Both stands add height and potentially ease the threat of aches and pains associated with sitting in front of a computer for any length of time. The latest HiRise lets users elevate their MacBook to the most comfortable viewing height, an option available from many stand manufacturers. What's new here is that you can adjust the HiRise from 3.7 inches (94mm) to 5.6 inches (142mm), to fine-tune the stand to accommodate the height of your desktop. 

Beautifully designed and packaged, the HiRise needs a little adjusting out of the box, via a simple spring-loaded system, to find a height that best suits. Made from brushed metal with silicone-lined, V-shaped arms to keep your MacBook in place, it's a quality stand that compliments Apple's iconic design ethos well. Twelve South notes these arms offer plenty of space for air to circulate around your MacBook, keeping the potential for heat to build up to a minimum. Thankfully, the stand comes with Teflon rails, so you can move the HiRise around without fear the metal might scratch or mark your desktop.

While relatively lightweight at 1.75 pounds (0.79 kg), the HiRise isn't very portable and will be of little use if you are constantly on the move, especially when accompanied by a second keyboard. Unless you have a spare lying around, you will need to budget for a keyboard and ideally mouse as the HiRise isn't designed for typing directly on. Usefully, if you are lucky enough to have a Thunderbolt Display to hand you can align the screen of your MacBook with the external display.

Macworld Buying Advice: HiRise for MacBook from Twelve South is a solid and stylish stand that makes sense for anyone who spends time working on their laptop sat at a desktop. Combined with external keyboard and mouse, typing, particularly, is a more pleasant and productive experience, one that should also improve posture and limit aches and pains.