Brydge for iPad

I’m at a crossroads with my hardware. As of this writing, I have a Mac Pro, a MacBook Pro, an iPad and an iPhone. I want to slim down. As a content creator who works with a great deal of photos, video and audio, I need something powerful. I was thinking of paring down to a suped-up new MacBook Pro (which is rumored to have a retina display) and an iPad, wirelessly accessing most of my files and media through hard drives connected to my secure home network. Then I saw Brydge.

One of the things that makes Apple products so appealing is their simple, graceful, minimal design. My problem with most iPad and iPhone add-ons is like the problem I have with new cars: they take something simple and sexy and strip it of all traces of the original elegance that made it appealing in the first place, creating a bloated beast that fell out of the fat and ugly tree, hitting every branch on the way down. Clunky and unrefined, with no trace of its original ingenious simplicity.

Brydge is different. Made of actual aluminum (instead of aluminum-painted plastic), it looks like a natural extension of the iPad. Almost as if Dieter Rams and Sir Jonny Ive designed it themselves in their spare time, it exploits Apple’s brilliant design aesthetic – an aesthetic of elegance, purity and simplicity that other manufacturers can never seem to touch. It looks undesigned, perfectly and seamlessly incidental, as if it couldn’t logically be designed any other way.

If I had this smart contraption for my iPad, it would essentially give me two laptop-esque situations. When I’m thinking now is to go for a new iMac (when the new ones come out) and use Brydge for the iPad, enabling me to do the design and multimedia work I need to do on the big iMac screen, and take advantage of the versatility and superlative portability of the iPad with Brydge.

I’m still undecided, but I’m pretty sure Brydge will be part of a leaner and meaner system here at GH HQ. For more on Brydge, check out the designers’ page on Kickstarter, which gives a full breakdown of Brydge’s impressive features.