You know what I love? The powder-finshed, matte-black Incase slider that lovingly (and minimally) surrounds my iPhone 4. You know what I hate? Pulling off the bottom of that case to dock the phone. You know what I hate even more? Charging it on its back, straight from USB cable.

And so I went searching, because surely I wasn’t alone in my docking need. And, lo, I wasn’t. Except that this Other Guy seemed to be an engineer–an engineer with access to machine shops and power lathes. In short, this Other Guy was in a position to actually do something about the proper docking of an iPhone inside an Incase slider. (Did I mention it’s powder-finished, matte-black and Seriously Minimal? Did I also indicate my more-than-slightly perverse love for it?) 

It’s a week later, and here it sits on my desk–a dock carved out of a single piece of aircraft-grade aluminum, with–wait for it–an anodized black finish. (Steady on, there–steady–be still, my design-fetishist’s heart.) A dock that literally has been machine-tooled to fit my powder-finished, matte- . . . well, you know. And, best of all, when the phone is off, the goddamned thing looks like it’s waiting to be discovered on the Moon in a Kubrick film–which is indisputably good.

And now, because I knew you were going to ask (how could you not?), here’s a short video of the dock’s first phase of manufacture: