Belkin Intros Thunderbolt Express Dock for MacBooks
Here's a Thunderbolt dock to expand your MacBook Air or MacBook Pro.
Belkin first announced the Thunderbolt Express Dock back in January 2012, reporting that the peripheral would be available in late September of the same year. Now just one day shy of May 2013, the company has finally released the Thunderbolt dock for a rather hefty price of $299.99 USD. Unfortunately, it's only compatible with three MacBook Air models and four MacBook Pro models.
"Designed to be an easy and powerful way to increase productivity and take advantage of Thunderbolt technology, Belkin’s Thunderbolt Express Dock allows creative professionals the ability to edit films in full HD 1080p, and transfer volumes of data in seconds at bidirectional 10 Gbps channels," the company said. "That is up to 20 times faster than with USB 2.0 and up to 12 times faster than with FireWire 800."
The Thunderbolt Express Dock features two Thunderbolt ports, one upstream and one downstream for daisy-chaining up to five additional Thunderbolt devices. There are also three USB 3.0 ports (up to 2 Gbps max), one FireWire 800 port, one Gigabit port, a 3.5-mm audio input jack and a 3.5-mm headphone output jack. There's even a cable management channel to keep things nice and tidy.
"With Thunderbolt Express Dock, all your drives, networking, input and output devices connect to the 8 ports on the back," the company said. "It in turn connects to your laptop through one Thunderbolt port. In short, eight cables become one cable. So taking your laptop when you go, and bringing it home when you return means dealing with a single cable. Which connects you to a very brave new world indeed."
Belkin’s Thunderbolt Express Dock comes packed with a power adapter – Thunderbolt cables are not included. The device specs also show that it's compatible with Apple's sleek MacBook Air, MacBook Air 11, MacBook Air 13, MacBook Pro, MacBook Pro 13, MacBook Pro 15 and MacBook Pro 17.
The dock is available now at Belkin.com for $299.99 and will be available at select retailers nationwide soon.
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Kevin Parrish has over a decade of experience as a writer, editor, and product tester. His work focused on computer hardware, networking equipment, smartphones, tablets, gaming consoles, and other internet-connected devices. His work has appeared in Tom's Hardware, Tom's Guide, Maximum PC, Digital Trends, Android Authority, How-To Geek, Lifewire, and others.
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InvalidError $300 for a TB bridge with crippled USB3 hub ("2Gbps max"), FireWire, audio and GbE... that's maybe $40 worth of parts including the external power brick. Not really worth more than $100 to most people and even that may feel like way too much for so little to many. For that sort of premium, I would have expected it to also have at least one internal bay for a 2.5" HDD/SSD.Reply
Of course, this sort of thing has niche-market status at this point in time due to how few computers have TB ports, how much of a premium most products with TB carry and how even fewer may actually use them, therefore rather low unit count expectations to spread development costs across.