Review: GelaSkins for Apple MacBook Pro

I spend a lot of time using my laptop, an Apple MacBook Pro, and for years I have had various stickers on the cover, a montage of brands and vendors. After a while, though, that become a bit tiring and when I saw more and more other people with the same sort of random pastiche of stickers, well, it was time to do something else.

Enter GelaSkins. After checking out their cool, super colorful "skins" for various devices at trade shows, I decided it'd be fun to get one for my MacBook and try a single full size sticker instead of a lot of little stickers. Their PR team was quite forthcoming in sending a discount code so I took the leap.

The biggest challenge? Figuring out which of the hundreds of different designs I wanted to have emblazoned on my laptop.

After spending a lot of time browsing their extensive gallery, I picked a piece called Sosheskaz Falls from Californian artist Philip Straub. His paintings are moody, dystopic future worlds very much in the spirit of classic 50s sci-fi and films like Blade Runner and it definitely appealed to my cinematic interests too.

The big question was whether I wanted to have the skin precut for the Apple logo on the back of the MacBook screen or not. I decided that I did want to see it rather than have it hidden by the skin but glowing through it anyway, which meant that the order process was considerably more complicated: I had to find the art I wanted, "favorite" it, then go into the custom skins area, select a 15" MacBook Pro with die-cut Apple logo, then apply the art. Tedious.

Let's get some pics here, so you can see the process.

First off, here's the piece by Philip Straub:

The sticker, die-cut for the Apple logo on a 15" MacBook Pro unibody, was $37.90 including shipping. Took about a week to get to me, at which time here's what I received:

In preparation for the new skin, I cleaned off the old stickers with a solvent cleaner (very carefully, needless to say!) until it was perfectly clean and smooth, which took about twenty minutes of careful work.

My biggest concern was in aligning the sticker, uh, skin, perfectly so that it exactly matched the logo and was square on the back. Turns out that these skins are printed on some sort of very cool 3M film that's thick, sticky, but also movable so if you don't position it exactly right, you can peel it off and try again.

First time I tried, however, I got it spot on:

Surprisingly easy, and the end result is amazingly cool. I get a lot of comments from people about how cool it is and where I got it, and at least three people have written down the name of the company to get a skin of their own. Which, of course, defeats the purpose of having something different, but we'll let that one alone.

One other thing to note: you can also upload your own custom graphic or artwork and GelaSkin will make a skin out of that too. Still frame from a favorite movie? Some splendid drawing that your child has done? A picture of your dog? The possibilities are endless!

Disclaimer: GelaSkins sent me a $40 coupon to try out a skin, so I didn't pay for this one. Next time I get a computer, however, if I can't move this skin across, I'll be buying a new one. No question about it.

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