So yesterday I wandered down to the Apple Store, with two goals in mind: check out the New USB3-Only Macbook, poke at the iPad Pro, and get a new phone.
The new Macbook? I’ll stick with my 13″ Air. I could probably use my normal set of Illustrator palettes on its little 12″ Retina screen, but it’s not enough of an upgrade in other ways to make me feel like biting. I’ll wait a few months and see if Apple decides to refresh the Air with a Retina screen and a 1TB drive option.
Similarly with the iPad Pro; while I have visions of using it with AstroPad for working in small spaces, I really just don’t feel like I want that enough to pay $800-1100 for that right now.
But a new phone, yeah, I wanted a new phone. Apple Pay and a decent battery life again; the power on mine’s been shit lately. I qualified for their new plan where you buy it on installments, and get a free upgrade to the latest phone every month – running the math showed that it was pretty close to the cost of buying a new phone every two years. So I got a gold 6S. Which is definitely proving to be a bit too tall for me, as I suspected – I can’t reach to the top of it while holding it one-handed. Especially with the naked exterior being so damn slippery.
So I went looking for cases. And discovered that there is a place that will print custom art on translucent cases. I promptly drew out an idea I’d had ever since putting a black case on my previous gold iPhone: a dragon swirling and curving around in the darkness, colored the gold of the phone’s case. Originally I’d thought it would be cool to do in a starker style that could be realistically laser-cut out of plastic, but since I was doing this in ink on plastic, I let myself get kind of detailed.
How will it come out? I dunno! I’ll probably post photos when it comes next week, if I like how it works. And post a ‘buy’ link for it too, because maybe some of my fellow dragon fanciers out there will like showing off their golden-backed gizmos in a similar way.