Rain Design mStand Silver Laptop Stand Review: Tipping Point
Another day, another Rain Design laptop stand review! We absolutely loved Rain Design’s mTower vertical laptop stand and when they offered to send out the product they are most well known for, the mStand, we were thrilled to try it out. This laptop stand is made with the same premium materials as the mTower but instead of folding your laptop and setting it vertically, the mStand is designed for your opened laptop to sit atop.
Unboxing & Initial Impressions
Rain Design’s packaging for the mStand is both simple and elegant. The outside of the box shows off the product.
The left side of the box shows off another mStand, the mStand tabletpro, next to the laptop version.
The back of the box has additional information in different languages.
Finally, the right side of the box shows off the mStand with several key features such as its solid single piece aluminum design, anodized aluminum finish and cable management cutout.
Here is the mStand as we unboxed it.
It comes with a Rain Design product guide.
As described earlier, the mStand is a solid piece of aluminum with rubber bumpers on both the top of the stand where it makes contact with your laptop as well as the bottom to ensure it has a stable foundation regardless of where it is set.
The cable management cutout is sized so that you can route all sorts of cables such as power, USB, DisplayPort, HDMI, mouse, keyboard, etc.
Here’s a closeup of the rubber bumpers on top of the mStand.
mStand + Surface Book 2
We chose a silver mStand to match our Microsoft Surface Book 2 and they match up extremely well.
You can extend the display nearly all the way before the laptop becomes unstable and falls backwards, this made the mStand unusable for our Surface Book 2. The problem is, when the laptop is on the mStand, it’s angled to such a point that you have to push the screen backwards so you can look at it without hunching over. There’s a point at which our Surface Book 2 became too top heavy and fell backwards. Even if we reduced the angle at which the screen is extended, it wasn’t not enough to comfortably view the screen…
The mStand provides a generous height extension to your laptop, roughly 6”.
If our Surface Book didn’t keep falling backwards, the height would have otherwise been comfortable according to several of our staff who tested it.
Conclusion
The mStand, like the packaging it comes in, is a simple and elegant product. Made by Rain Design, a company well known for its proficiency developing quality, reliable and attractive laptop and mobile accessories, the mStand literally stands above its competition.
Unlike the mTower, which in all fairness is a completely different product for a different customer, the mStand simply didn’t stand up to our tests with the Surface Book 2 and therefore we cannot recommend it to Surface Book users.