The HomePod's cord is permanently attached, and a cord is a curve. Our stand is a straight rigid post. Those two things have to live together somehow, and if you don't decide how, you end up with a loop of cable hanging in mid-air with nothing to rest on.
The Anglepoise settled this a long time ago. That's where we took the idea from.
Look at where its cable goes. The arms are hollow, so the long straight runs are inside them. At the elbow it comes back out, loops around the pivot, and goes back in. Same at the top, where the shade tilts. Inside for the straight runs, outside at the joints and the curves — on show where the lamp moves, put away where it's only travelling.
The man who designed it was an automotive suspension engineer, which is probably why our NoBox Dad noticed it in the first place. His masters is in mechanical engineering, specialising in vibrations, and he spent his first years out of school doing chassis and suspension design in Detroit.
Why it works is simple enough. A curve with both ends fixed looks like it's doing something. A curve with one end loose looks like nobody dealt with it. Same shape, same weight — the difference is whether it's going anywhere.
Hiding a HomePod cord, and why we don't
So the hole in our post isn't there to hide the cable. It's there to give the curve somewhere to land. The cord comes off the HomePod, drops, and goes in. People call this cable management. Really it's just deciding where the curve ends.
It comes back out at the base to reach your outlet. We could have run it out the underside and kept it out of the photographs, but it has to plug into a wall and you'd find out in about four seconds.
Let's play.
Lamp photographs: Anglepoise Model 90 by TheGoodEndedHappily, CC BY-SA 4.0, cropped. Anglepoise 1227 by CATMANUM, public domain.
