The Best Laptop Stands for Working at a Desk

A laptop is an ergonomic compromise by design: the screen and keyboard are fixed together, so putting the screen at eye level puts the keyboard somewhere useless. There is no arrangement of a bare laptop on a desk that is good for your neck and your wrists at the same time. A stand does not solve that on its own. It solves half of it, and it commits you to solving the other half — once the laptop is raised, you need an external keyboard and mouse, because the built-in ones are now at chest height. Anyone who buys a stand and keeps typing on the laptop has traded a neck problem for a shoulder problem. So treat the stand as one part of a two-part purchase. The three below differ in whether they stay on your desk or travel with you.

Rain Design mStand - the one that lives on the desk

Cast from a single piece of aluminium, with no hinges, no telescoping sections and no adjustment. That sounds like a limitation and is mostly a feature: there is nothing to work loose, and after two years it sits exactly where it sat on day one. The fixed height suits most people at a standard desk, which is the catch — most, not all. If you are notably tall or short, a fixed stand puts the screen at someone else's eye level and you will be craning either way. Buy it if your laptop rarely leaves the desk and you are of roughly average height. It is the least fussy option here by a distance.

Rain Design 10032 mStand Laptop Stand, Silver (Patented)

Rain Design iLevel2 - the one you can set to your own height

Same build quality as the mStand with a slider that changes the height. That matters more than it sounds, because eye level is personal and a fixed stand is a guess at the average. It is the right choice if you share a desk, if you alternate between sitting and standing, or if you are outside average height. Being able to set the screen where your eyes actually are is the entire point of raising it in the first place. The mechanism adds a little flex compared to the solid mStand. You will notice it if you type hard on the laptop keyboard — but if you are typing on the laptop keyboard with the stand raised, the height is not your real problem.

Rain Design iLevel2 Adjustable Height Laptop Stand (Patented) (Silver)

Roost V3 - the one that travels

Folds down to roughly the size of a rolled magazine and weighs almost nothing, which is the whole argument. A stand that lives at home does nothing for the days you work from a kitchen table or a co-working desk, and those are usually the days your posture is worst. Several height settings, and it holds firm once locked despite being mostly plastic - the structure does the work rather than the material. The compromise is footprint: it lifts the laptop on a narrow frame rather than a broad platform, so there is no space underneath for a keyboard to slide away. If your desk is small and you want the keyboard tucked under the stand at the end of the day, the mStand suits better.

Roost V3 Laptop Stand - Adjustable and Extremely Portable Laptop Stand - PC and MacBook Stand

Budget for the keyboard and mouse at the same time. A stand without them moves the problem from your neck to your shoulders, and the total cost of doing this properly is the stand plus about the same again — worth knowing before you buy the stand and discover the rest. Height target: the top of the screen roughly level with your eyes, so your gaze falls slightly downward. Slightly too low is much better than slightly too high, because looking down a little is a neutral neck position and looking up is not. And if you only take one thing from this: a $20 stack of books plus a real keyboard beats a $90 stand and no keyboard. The stand is the nicer object; the keyboard is the part that fixes the ergonomics.

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