Hey thanks for the comments,
@zhenya -- actually your picture leaves off the big point.. With other thunderbolt docks, you have to connect power to your laptop AND the thunderbolt plug (your pic just shows tb). With ZenDock, it's just one single connection.
No it's not. They are still 2 connections. The only difference is that you can hook them up both at the same time.
Apple notebooks come with only 1 power adapter. Most people leave it at that and take it anywhere the notebook goes. And that makes sense. This means that we need to take the power adapter, put it in your connector then hook it up to the notebook. It is much easier to just hook up the power adapter straight to the notebook. Much less fiddly than your setup. Your setup only works good when you have 2 power adapters: one to stay at home with the dock and another one in your bag to go where your notebook goes. A new power adapter costs $100.
Simply put: I can buy the Thunderbolt dock from CalDigit or Matrox for about the same price as your dock plus additional power adapter. The big advantage with those other 2 docks: it only takes up 1 TB port and the magsafe port. All the other ports are accessible. In other words, in total I have much more ports that I can use.
Theres also something you should really consider -- if you need Firewire, or you need wired Ethernet, you probably already have those adapters, and they are compatible with the ZenDock Retina. With other thunderbolt docks, you will essentially be buying those again -- another reason why they are so much more expensive than ours.
That shows you didn't do your homework properly. The aforementioned docks have both ethernet and firewire 800 on them. No need to buy or hookup additional adapters or even buy them. Buying additional adapters means additional costs pricing your dock higher than the ones from Matrox and CalDigit for example. If you already have those additional adapters it also means you can keep it in your bag and use them on the go (your dock would require people to buy 2 sets of them which make it even more costly or switch the adapters between dock and notebook which makes the dock useless).
Even when including the price of the ethernet add on, ZenDock is still very significantly less than other similar docs and that is the real magic.
It is but it also comes at a cost: you can do much less with your dock and the notebook once the dock is connected. Remember, your dock is merely passthrough. The problem is that most people don't want something like that. They want to have something like the other TB docks that have a much smaller footprint. People want the dock to
add connections which your dock doesn't do. Your dock only reroutes the position of the connectors (from notebook to say behind your desk).
As for mounting -- I guess you could duct tape other thunderbolt docks behind your desk, but personally I think that is a little less elegant than our CNC'ed mounting holes.
Mounting isn't a problem, there are many solutions for that. Some of them are very elegant and use the desk to hide components. Even things like routers, switches, external drives and so on. Websites such as
Lifehacker have
some tips on how to do this. But it is good to have something like this on the product already.
PS -- Here what it looks like to have 4 monitors on the Macbook with the ZenDock Retina (last monitor is connected via macbook HDMI)
What do you use for the other 2 external displays?
There is some potential with the ZenDock but it isn't in the Thunderbolt dock area. The potential is in the area where there isn't any Thunderbolt, like the MacBooks from 2010 and earlier. There are some docks for those but they haven't got a footprint as small as the ZenDock. In the Thunderbolt area there are other docks that are cheaper at the end of the day and also offer much more functionality because they are not using passthrough. All in all your product doesn't seem to be thought out very well due to a lack of understanding of the market (especially understanding of what Thunderbolt exactly is, offers and what people want). As you can see in this thread people simply fail to understand what your dock does and why it is better than the other ones.