I need a new laptop. You need people to remember your name. So I'm selling ten patches of anodised aluminium on the lid of a MacBook Pro, and a fiber laser is going to remove your logo from the dye layer at 1064 nanometres. It doesn't peel. It doesn't fade. It doesn't come off in the resale photos.
Hover a rectangle to see what it costs. Everything is measured off the real lid: 356 × 248 mm of Space Black anodised 6000-series aluminium, minus the Apple logo (which stays, because I'm not a vandal) and an 18 mm keep-out band along the hinge where the Wi-Fi and Bluetooth antennas live.
Prices are fixed, not auctioned — I'd rather spend the evening aligning a jig than running a bidding war. First message with a usable vector file gets the spot. The ten together come to £6,750, which is £51 more than the laptop. That covers the test coupons, the laser time and the isopropyl.
There is a whole cottage industry of people renting out laptop lids for stickers. It's a fine idea and I understand the appeal: it's reversible, it's cheap, and if the brand turns out to be a rug-pull you scrape it off with a fingernail and pretend it never happened.
That's exactly the problem. A sticker is a second surface. It sits on top of the machine with a 60-micron gap of acrylic adhesive between your logo and anything real, and everyone can see it. It curls at the corner after three flights. It collects a grey tidemark of skin oil. It gets caught on a backpack zip in Terminal 2 and now your seed-stage logo is a torn crescent that says NER. When the sponsorship ends, it goes in the bin, and so does the memory of it.
An etch is not on the laptop. An etch is the laptop. The laser doesn't add anything — there's no ink, no vinyl, no adhesive. It ablates the anodic dye off the top of the aluminium and leaves your logo standing there as bright bare metal, a few microns down, catching the light differently from every other part of the lid. It survives the airport. It survives the resale listing. It survives me.
| A sticker | An etch | |
|---|---|---|
| What it is | Vinyl and adhesive, sitting on the lid | The absence of anodising. It's the lid. |
| Applied with | A thumb and some optimism | A 1064 nm fiber laser, a jig, one pass |
| Alignment | Vibes | ±0.05 mm, proofed on a test coupon first |
| Lifespan | Until the first backpack zip | Until the aluminium is recycled |
| Removal | Fingernail, thirty seconds, no trace | An angle grinder and a new lid |
| Effect on resale | None whatsoever | Catastrophic — which is the entire point |
| Commitment shown | Zero. It's a rental. | Total. It's a tattoo. |
| What it says | "I picked this up at a conference" | "I did this on purpose, and I can't take it back" |
Anyone will let you rent their laptop for a month. I'm offering you the rest of its life.
None of this is new. In 2007 Leah Culver sold advertising space on a 15" MacBook Pro at $50 per square inch, got about forty sponsors, and had the whole lid laser-etched with help from Squid Labs. Welding masks came out for the tests on mylar. Four sponsors' logos came out wrong. Her rate is about $78 a square inch in today's money; mine is not quite twice that, which I justify with the two things that changed since 2007 — there are ten spots here instead of forty, and Apple now charges Max money for a Max. I've read her write-up carefully, and steps 3 and 4 exist because of those four logos.
One colour, vector, outlines converted — SVG, PDF or AI. No gradients, no soft shadows, no drop shadow that only exists in the PNG you have. Minimum stroke 0.35 mm, minimum counter (the hole in an e) 0.5 mm, or it fills in and your wordmark becomes a smudge.
I place it at 1:1 on the spot you bought, send you a render on the real lid geometry, and you sign off on the exact position and scale in writing. This is the last point at which anything can be moved.
Same alloy, same anodising, same colour, cut from a scrap lid. I ramp power, speed and pulse frequency across a grid and pick the settings where the mark goes bright without heat-tinting the edges or blowing through into the substrate. Your specific artwork gets etched on the coupon, not just a test square.
The lid comes off the machine — no display, no battery, no logic board anywhere near the laser. It gets clamped dead flat (a 0.3 mm bow throws the focus and the edges go grey), masked with Kapton outside the field, and the focal height is set with the machine's own probe rather than by eye.
Roughly 20 watts, 20 kHz, fast — the pulse vaporises the anodic dye layer and stops. It is deliberately not a deep engrave: cutting into the metal would raise a burr and weaken a panel that is under a millimetre thick in places. Extraction runs the whole time; the vapour off anodising is not something to breathe.
Isopropyl, a lint-free cloth, and a photo of your logo on the finished lid within 24 hours. There is no step seven. There is no revision round. It's metal.
It's the machine I'll be writing everything on for the next four or five years — the emulator work, the reverse engineering notes, the ham radio logs. It goes to cafés, to meetups, to the repair bench, and it sits open on a train table where strangers read it upside down.
No. That's the product. If you might want it gone, buy a sticker somewhere else — there are several good sites for that and I mean it sincerely.
Then someone buys a laptop with your logo on it and it keeps travelling. That's a feature. I'm not going to sell it, but the etch outlasts my intentions either way.
No. A fiber laser removes material, it doesn't print. You get one colour: bright bare aluminium against Space Black. Most logos look better this way than they do in their own palette, which is an awkward thing to learn about your rebrand.
It can be halftoned — dithered into dots, like newsprint. At these sizes it reads as texture rather than image. Send it and I'll show you a coupon before you pay anything.
Full refund, and the photograph of the mistake goes on this page permanently with your name on it, because that's what actually happened. Leah's four botched sponsors got a story out of it; you'd get one too. Step 3 exists so this doesn't happen.
Click any rectangle on the spot map. It opens with the deposit — half the spot price — and a PayPal button with the amount already filled in. Put the spot code (L1, S3, and so on) in the PayPal note so I know which rectangle you've bought. That deposit reserves the spot and pays for a test coupon etched with your actual artwork. The remaining half is invoiced only after the photo of the finished lid is in your inbox, so you never pay the balance for something you haven't seen. Bank transfer works too if you'd rather — just ask. The deposit is refundable at any point before the laser fires.
Gambling, crypto tokens, adult content, MLM, anything with an active fraud case, and any logo I'd be embarrassed to explain in a café for the next five years. I'd rather buy the laptop myself. There's no appeals process; it's my face attached to it, on a train table, permanently.
Absolutely not, and they would hate it. Apple, MacBook and MacBook Pro are trademarks of Apple Inc. The Apple logo on the lid is staying exactly where it is and is not for sale.
L1
in the note so I know which rectangle you've bought. It reserves the spot and pays for a test coupon in your own artwork.Deposit is fully refundable right up until the laser fires — after that it isn't, because the aluminium isn't. If your artwork can't be made to work at this size, you get the whole deposit back and I'll say so before the balance is ever invoiced. PayPal will show the amount in whichever currency you've picked at the top of the page.