Professionals that already use Macs are quite unlikely to have eSATA equipped devices because Macs have never had native eSATA ports. FireWire 800 is far more likely because it's been integrated into Macs for so long.
My Macbook Pro retina is connected via two Thunderbolt ports to two 27" Eizo screens. As we speak I have no way of connecting any Firewire hard drives so I had buy the Lacie 2big Thunderbolt and Lacie Little Big Disk Thunderbolt. This was expensive as hell, but the speed is unbelievable! Especially the Lacie LBD which is working at 500-600mb/s!!
The only problem is that i also have a Nikon 8000ED Coolscan for scanning my 6x6 and 6x7 film which uses exclusively Firewire which I now can't use without disconnecting one of the monitors and using the Firewire/Thunderbolt adapter. Same thing with the Ethernet that I would normally use.
In conclusion, I'm really really looking forward to this Belkin dock!
PS. The dock will obviously also make it quicker to connect my MBP to the 2 monitors, 2 printers, keyboard, mouse, 4 thunderbolt hard drives, 2 USB 3.0 backup hard drives, 2 film scanners and speakers
If I'm going to walk away from the table with this thing on it I would think there should be a security slot. Did I miss it?
.....What this is for, and the reason it's called a 'docking station' (going back to the 90's and early 2000's when laptops had a dock you'd connect them to that did just this), is because it's for thunderbolt equipped laptops. You work with your laptop on the go, spend all day with it, etc. Then you come home, set it at your desk, plug in ONE cable (plus the charger), and you have your monitor (You can still use an adapter at the end of your thunderbolt chain to connect it to a non thunderbolt monitor, or use it as a mini Displayport port), your external hard drives, a wired keyboard and mouse if you have one, etc.
As it is right now, I plug my laptop into a mini DisplayPort monitor (Apple display), a USB 3.0 Hub, MagSafe, and Optical Audio. The hubs (display is a USB 2.0 hub) connect my iPhone, an external drive, an external DVD drive (I have the optical bay replaced with a second SSD), a beloved wired mouse that I have had for more than 10 years that I simply won't do without, an iPad, etc. Optical audio goes to my sound system, etc. I also connect it to GbE occasionally, especially when I have a large time machine backup or need to move large files across my network (it's over twice as fast as Wireless N in dual 5GHz mode) A dock, in theory, could replace 5 connections to my laptop, with just one. Nifty huh? It's a convenience thing, many don't want to pay for that convenience, but some do. It also ADDS ports without adapters. Many Mac laptops no longer have ethernet, some of us still use it at our desks because it's faster.....-John
.....How can they even take away eSATA and drop it $100? Just goes to show how overpriced it already is and they knew it. They tried to justify removing a port for dropping the price so they could hide the fact at how overpriced it really is.
Can you elaborate? Unreliable data speeds or anything more serious like mouse/keyboard problems? I can understand data speed fluctuation, as it's the CPU prioritizing things. It sucks nonetheless.
Apple just doesn't give us enough ports.
I certainly can appreciate that, but is it really worth $300 to do that? Maybe to some, but I'm having a hard time seeing it, especially if one already has a 2012 Mac that has USB3.
I have an rMBP, and two USB3 ports are already there, so at a minimum I could buy the TB-FW and TB-Gigabit adapters plus an iMic, for under $100... Toss in a 4 port USB3 hub, and I'm still at half the price of this thing, though I have all my TB ports full.
Even if you have a Mac that has TB but not USB3, you're likely still going to need a USB3 hub...
At this late date, I'd rather save the $300 and put it toward a revised TB Display that will have USB3.
Get the Apple 27"Thunderbolt Monitor. You can daisy chain it to our current Monitors. It gives you an extra FireWire 800 port,as well as an extra Ethernet and USB 2.0 ports.
I can't believe this has been so hard for manufacturers. Tbolt is going to be dead if they can't even get these basic devices out. (If it isn't dead already)
I just want a $50 thunderbolt enclosure. You can't make a product/accessory popular with ridiculous pricing this far after it's launch.
I'm one of those unlucky souls that bought a new 15'' MBP 45 days before the rMBP's came out and too late to return it. As such, I have thunderbolt, but only one port and I only have USB 2. I only upgrade every 2-2.5 years, so this guy still have another 1-1.5 years of life in it. A docking solution that adds USB 3 would be really nice as I can then use USB3 hard drives at their full potential. Even if its 2.5Gbps and not the full 5Gbps, that's still faster than the 480Mbps I have now. Granted, I still have a FW800 port too, but for those that don't, this offers it. And then there's convenience. Right now my daily routine is to plug in my power, 1Gbps, thunderbolt to DVI and a USB hub. With a docking solution I can just do power and one thunderbolt cable and be done. The downside for me is the lack of dual display outputs. I don't care if its thunderbolt out as I can use adaptors for mini display port to VGA, DVI, or HDMI. But for $300 I want two be able to drive two of them. If I'm only going to get to use one monitor as I do now, then I'll pay the $50-$100 this is worth. Add in another external monitor option and I'll pay $300 for the convenience and the functionality it would bring me.
If so it was a rare one. Few USB devices made it to market until USB 1.1, released in August 1998, which fixed problems identified in 1.0, mostly relating to hubs. 1.1 was the earliest revision to be widely adopted. Which means that you were most likely one of the few people in the country that knew about and had USB before August 1998.
Belkin, let me help you...
1. Put back the eSata
2. Lower the price to $99
3. Sell a thousand times more at that price then you would at $300
4. Profit.
Really? So, if TB would be exactly like USB 3 (just twice as fast but at the same price) it would have beaten USB 3? Definitely not, USB 3 doesn't need new ports, is backwards compatible and fast enough for any single storage device.TB is great on paper and tech specs and solves some business problems. But then the pricetag comes in, the zero-to-little hardware support, and a competing product (USB 3.0 and probably even gigabit or 10gigabit ethernet) to competes on most of the point of even having TB (the speed) and you have the reason why 2 years after its release nobody uses it and there are an extremely small amount of products for it. If TB were designed (and I'm not saying they should have) to be simply a really fast, next-gen cable system to supercede USB 2.0 or Firewire, it would have been cheaper and much more adopted by now...but they chose to make it do everything including the kitchen sink and that stuff takes time and costs money (licensing) and money for the consumer and money/risk for the hardware vendors and at the end of the day, a compelling event for the consumer. I'm not going to buy an expensive stereo receiver if it's got 50 features and 40 of them I will never use and that nobody has hardware for.
It is my understanding that USB to DVI (or HDMI or DP) essentially requires the emulation of a graphic card in the host computer's CPU (as the GPU will not send out data to a USB port). While possible, it is very suboptimal from a performance point.Of course I also just realized that the USB3 brings another benefit I could use a USB3 to HDMI or DVI adaptor and get a display that way. So one goes from the t-bolt out to a display and the other goes out via USB to DVI, for example.
Get the Apple 27"Thunderbolt Monitor. You can daisy chain it to our current Monitors. It gives you an extra FireWire 800 port,as well as an extra Ethernet and USB 2.0 ports.
Kill the Firewire port and add 1 or 2 extra USB3.
Make it support two non thunderbolt monitors from the hub (not sure if it does this already).
Didn't think you could daisy-chain a non-Thunderbolt monitor to an Apple Thunderbolt Display: when you plug a displayPort device into a TB socket, it disables TB and outputs a DisplayPort signal instead - which it has to get from somewhere.
A computer gets it from the video card.
A HD/dock gets it from the single DisplayPort signal extracted from Thunderbolt by the Thunderbolt controller.
...but the TB display is already using that signal for its internal screen. So you have to put another non-display TB device, with a second TB controller to extract the second DisplayPort signal, between the TB display and the non-TB display.
Similar problem - only one display per TB controller. If you put (say) a HDMI port on the hub, you couldn't also drive a displayport monitor from the TB out, without adding another, intermediate TB device.
I guess it ought to be possible to rig it so that you could either use the HDMI/DVI port in the hub OR connect a DisplayPort monitor to the TB out - but since Belkin dropped the HDMI they'd originally proposed, while Matrox offer HDMI but no TB out I'd guess that isn't as simple as it sounds.
USB succeeded because it solved a massive existing problem: we had too many peripherals, not enough ports, and adding devices was a hell-on-earth of drivers and IRQ conflicts. Remember trying to get a ZipDrive working through a parallel port? Ouch.
Thunderbolt is failing, and will fail (at least at the mass-consumer level), because it solves a niche issue: Existing device types at ultra-high bandwidth.
While I think you are correct in the above, what stops Belkin from putting two TB controllers into one box (apart from cost)?
I don't think it would add much complexity. If somebody wants two external monitors, then they plug two monitors into the box. What is complex about that?Cost & complexity. Not everybody would want their dock to slurp both video signals from the Thunderbolt bus so it would all have to be switchable/configurable somehow.
The ultimate solution ought to be something like this : http://www.sonnettech.com/product/echoexpresschassis.html - slap in a PCIe video card and you've got a brace of extra display outputs. They'll be throttled a bit with only one PCIe lane instead of 8 but probably OK for providing extra screen estate. Unfortunately, last time I looked, those enclosures had price tags that were utterly ludicrous (unless you had a professional need to plug a PCIe pro video/audio capture card into a laptop).
Myself, I'd probably buy such a box (that allows me to connect to external monitors) even if cost up to $500.