NEET Sleeve to Protect Your Lightning Cables by Mark Pouley

Greetings from the beautiful and remote shores of Twin Lakes Washington. This is Mark Pouley with a quick review of a product I picked up at Macworld. Actually, I bought the product for my wife and this is her review. When I go to Macworld I’m always looking for some sort of gadget to bring home to my wife. I know ladies, I’m a romantic like that. This year the NEET Sleeve by NEET Products caught my eye.

We all have cables cluttering our life and that can be a pain. For my wife that means tossing her iPhone lightning cable in her bag to carry it to and from the office. It gets buried at the bottom of the bag in a tangled mess. 

The sleeve is a silky cloth cable cover with a thin wire running it’s full length. The sleeves come in many different colors and for several different style of cables. You can buy them with cables preinstalled or with zippers to install your own cables. The sleeve serves several purposes. 
Initially it’s the color that catches your eye. I bought a pink sleeve and the wife says “it’s cute and easy to find.” In fact, that’s a selling point, different colors for different cables makes them easy to identify in a bag or drawer. But beyond the aesthetics, the sleeve actually makes the cable seem more substantial. We’ve all had cables get pinched or had the casing fray. With the cable installed in the sleeve you can worry less about wear and tear on the cable.

The wire in the sleeve is the second element of the product. The wire allows you to wrap the cable up and have it stay wrapped without tangles. But the wire also allows to use the cable in new ways. For instance, you can plug the usb end into a computer or jack that is under a table or desk and bring the other end of the cable up to the work surface; give it a little bend and it will stay hanging on the edge of the desk. Another clever use is to coil the sleeve and cable around your wrist, now your hands are free to carry other things without wrestling with a long cord.

I asked her if it felt like the interior wire might break like the wires in a twist tie. But the sleeve doesn’t seem to bend so severely as to allow a kink that would eventually break. When I pressed a bit more for the cons for this review, my wife couldn’t think of any negatives to the sleeve.

For me I wonder if the price is too high. A three foot sleeve comes out to about $10 plus the cost of a cable. I asked my wife if she thought it was worth it. Initially she said “You mean if it broke would I want to buy another? I expect you’d replace it for me, so yes.” I’m not sure that’s an answer, but I think it might be worth the price if you need this functionality.

You can find NEET sleeves on Amazon and the complete product line on Neetproducts.com.  Ok. The sun and the lake are beckoning so I need to go.

You can find Mark’s amazing photography at twinlakesimages.com.