Belkin is finally shipping the long-awaited Thunderbolt Express Dock
This is a good-looking breakout box providing the following interfaces:
- 1 Gigabit Ethernet port
- 1 Firewire 800 port
- Headphone audio output
- Line audio input
- 3 USB 3.0 ports
- A Thunderbolt pass-thru (for daisy-chaining up to 5 additional TB devices
With this, you can attach an entire desk's worth of peripherals to this one device, and simply connect/disconnect a single Thunderbolt cable (not included, sadly) to connect/disconnect your laptop to it all.
If it included a MagSafe cable for charging your laptop battery, it would effectively be the docking station solution that Apple has never wanted to ship.
Strangely, Belkin does not list non-laptop Macs as compatible. I will be interested to see some reviews to determine if this is just marketing or if it really isn't compatible with a Mac mini or iMac.
At $300 (MSRP), it's a bit pricey, but not obnoxiously so.
2 comments:
DVI or HDMI port would have been nice too...
Thunderbolt incorporates mini-DisplayPort. So you can attach an inexpensive passive adapter to the TB pass-thru port and drive any HDMI, DVI or DisplayPort monitor. And if you have other TB devices, you should be able to attach it to one of their pass-thru ports (assuming they are designed properly.)
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