Classic beach flair meets timeless style in Fairfield home | Colored Polycarbonate Sheet

As any avid smartphone user will know, it’s getting increasingly difficult to find a glass screen protector that actually sticks to the phone with no issues. The ZAGG InvisibleShield caused terrible screen sensitivity, and I don’t dare touch any of the cheap offerings on eBay. However, there is one company that screen protector enthusiasts have begun to flock to: Whitestone Dome. The South Korea-based company uses separate UV-dependent adhesive for its glass protectors, and it works wonders.

Advanced technology is pivotal to the contemporary design: the full-LED headlights are the most slender ever to appear on a production Land Rover vehicle. The flush deployable door handles on the Range Rover Velar help emphasize a taut, elegant design language and contribute to a coefficient of drag of only 0.32Cd making it the most aerodynamically efficient Land Rover vehicle to date.

The iMac, relaunching Apple, fully launched Ive. For more than a decade, Jobs and Ive lunched and travelled together. Jobs liked to tease him for what he saw as Britain’s imperial delusions—“All hat and no cattle,” in Powell Jobs’s summary—but Ive told me that, on one visit to the U.K., he and Jobs spent a morning with Prince Charles, at Highgrove, his country house. Bob Mansfield, a former senior hardware engineer at Apple, who is now semi-retired, recently described the pique that some colleagues felt about Ive’s privileged access. As he put it, “There’s always going to be someone vying for Dad’s attention.” But Mansfield was grateful for Ive’s cool handling of a C.E.O. who was “not the easiest guy to please.” Mansfield’s view was “Jony puts up with a lot, and, as a result of him doing it, people like me don’t have to.”

By the way, during each stage of the process, every helmet is inspected by the operator to ensure quality.

Pedestrian impact protection was a priority too, and the material grade and form of the aluminum hood were developed to ensure progressive absorption of energy and optimized clearance from hard points in the engine compartment.

Prior to receiving this case, I thought that cases couldn’t get any thinner than Spigen’s Thin Fit or Pitaka’s MagCase. Boy, was I wrong. This nameless case from MNML (get it? it’s a minimal version of the word ‘minimal’) is almost impossibly thin. It’s barely thicker than a vinyl skin, and yet it’s a case. It’s ridiculously minimal.

The next day, I visited Ive in his studio. The table previously covered with a flat cloth was now uncovered: it was a glass-topped Apple Watch display cabinet, accessible to staff from below, via a descending, motorized flap, like the ramp at the rear of a cargo plane. Ive has begun to work with Ahrendts, Apple’s senior vice-president of retail, on a redesign—as yet unannounced—of the Apple Stores. These new spaces will surely become a more natural setting for vitrines filled with gold (and perhaps less welcoming, at least in some corners, to tourists and truants). Apple had not, overnight, become an élite-oriented company—and it would sell seventy-five million iPhones in the final quarter of 2014, many of them in China—but I wondered how rational, and pure of purpose, one can make the design of a V.I.P. area. Ive later told me that he had overheard someone saying, “I’m not going to buy a watch if I can’t stand on carpet.”

I was so looking forward to installing a glass screen protector on my Pixel 2 XL, given the $900+ that I had to trade Google for it. I’ve been using them for years and have installed a metric buttload, though in recent years, they’ve been getting worse due to curved screens. ZAGG is not immune to this, and its InvisibleShield Glass Curve made me realize I’d rather have no screen protector and risk scratching/cracking my screen than have a crappy one.

Sealing is important in a rugged machine as dust can gum up the works, and water can render a computer inoperable or destroy the electronics completely. Xplore claims IP65 for the XSLATE L10, where the "6" stands for being dustproof and the "5" for the ability to handle low pressure water jets from all directions.

It gets worse when you put the case on your phone. There are no buttons, only cutouts. This is fine when executed properly, like on the Spigen Thin Fit, but Bellroy has made the phone’s buttons a royal pain to use by literally just putting holes where the buttons on the phone are. Additionally, the case itself feels like it has to stretch to actually fit the phone. Again, not confidence-inspiring. From what I can tell, the only aspect of this case that can be considered ‘premium’ is the microfiber lining inside, but that’s minuscule in the grand scheme of things.

I legitimately don’t understand how a company could even approve a product of this quality for production. I’d always known that ZAGG products were expensive, but they were at least high-quality. But this InvisibleShield, which retails for $49.99, is the opposite of high-quality. It completely fails at being a screen protector, and I’d rather have no protection on my screen than have this thing on it. If I sound angry, it’s because I am. I’m not sure how this made it past the prototyping stage, and I wouldn’t even pay a tenth of the price for it.

Installation view of Svizzera 240: House Tour at the Swiss Pavilion at the 16th International Architecture Exhibition, La Biennale di Venezia. Photo: Wilson Wootton.