Cutting corners: Every blank area is a potential advertising space, whether it's on the side of a building or the back of a MacBook. People already inadvertently use that area, as is clear from the rows of laptop lids covered in stickers you'd spot at any cafe – a fair few of them featuring big-name brands. However, one smart French developer worked out that he could be sending an invoice for it. Surprisingly, he doesn't even have the MacBook yet.
The developer here is Vincent, who posts on X as @VynseDev and works out of Bordeaux.
On August 26, he launched Brand My Mac, a small website designed to act as a fundraiser – or an auction – for ten sticker spots on a MacBook Pro he does not actually own. The money from those spots is what pays for the laptop.
– Vincent (@VynseDev) August 26, 2026
Specifically, he is after a 14-inch MacBook Pro in silver with Apple's M5 chip, 32 GB of memory, and a 1 TB SSD, which costs €2,529 at Apple's French store, or about $3,000. His old machine, by his own account, is dying, so he needs a new one – mainly for building mobile apps, since iOS work without a Mac is miserable.
Those ten spots surround the Apple logo, since that one patch of the lid has to stay untouched. Vincent priced them all by size and visibility, from €125 for a small square up to €400 for one of the large banners. Winners get a vinyl sticker cut to the exact shape of their logo, stuck to the lid, plus a link on the project page.
Bidding on any of those requires a 20% deposit, charged to your card and refunded in full if someone beats you. New bids have to clear the standing bid by at least €10. Vincent also approves every sponsor by hand before a logo goes anywhere near the thing.
At the time of writing, the auction page shows roughly €7,283 across all ten spots, a bit over $8,000. His bid history lists 118 bids, with 11 days left. See.io currently holds the marquee slot above the Apple logo at €1,715.
Worth mentioning is that roughly 21% of the total disappears into French taxes, so covering that €2,529 really takes about €3,200. Anything past that pays for the travel he's planning to do.
As is often the case with innovative stuff like this, copycats have already started popping up. Vincent is now building a version of this for other people. It handles the sticker spots, the auction, and the payments for whatever machine you own. There is a waitlist on the Brand My Mac page, too.