Considering the new Macbooks releasing in a few days might have USB3.0 and the usual Ethernet, FW800, Thunderbolt. The only thing they got going on this is eSata which I might add is buggy as hell for portable enclosures. Good luck, too late.
ThunderBolt WILL die in the consumer market. The killer? USB 3. ThunderBolt is simply too expensive and no one is making anything worth buying at the price they can pay. I can get USB 3 drives and accessories all day long at reasonable prices. Same with eSata. Can I plug all those into my MacBook at once with one cable? No. But I can buy those devices and plug them all in for way less than this stupidly overpriced dock.
Nope, they're going after the market and people like me who can afford to and are happy to pay premiums for high end, new technology that benefits customers like me.Ouch!
Have Belkin adopted the Monster Cable (TM) pricing policy?
Really, you can daisy chain USB3 and eSATA? Didn't think so. Not to mention the throughput on USB 3 is half of Thunderbolt, and I can't put a display at the end of a nonexistent USB 3.0 chain. I've heard similar arguments and accusations made against Blu-Ray, you just aren't seeing the long game.
Nope, they're going after the market and people like me who can afford to and are happy to pay premiums for high end, new technology that benefits customers like me.
Really, you can daisy chain USB3 and eSATA? Didn't think so. Not to mention the throughput on USB 3 is half of Thunderbolt, and I can't put a display at the end of a nonexistent USB 3.0 chain.
By the time this Belkin device is shipping the Mac mini likely has USB 3. And you could use the optical drive of the Mac mini (at least one could with FW target mode, not sure about TB target mode). And since every Mac can serve as a router (with its Internet sharing feature), it should be conceivable to enable Ethernet via TB (it is possible in principle over FW). And the mini can be a file server and thus could serve external storage connected to it like a NAS.The Mac mini isn't a dock. I can't hook my MBA up to a mini and suddenly start using its Ethernet or FW800 ports.
The mini doesn't have eSATA nor does it have USB 3.0.
A refurbished Mac mini might come close.Show me a $450 computer with Thunderbolt and Firewire please
I think Macs are marketed towards the 1% (if you take the whole world population).This thing is clearly marketed toward the 1%
I'll get one when it hits $99 - cable included.
You really get a giddy feeling from being overcharged for a product?
Big names for a lot of parts that don't cost a lot of money! Add them up.
I have two Voyager Q HDD docks which have FW800, eSATA and USB 2. For single HDDs, eSATA might not be much faster than FW800 but if I happen to put a SSD in it, eSATA should clearly pull ahead (whether that is worth getting an eSATA cable and whether that whole chain of TB-Belkin-eSATA-Voyager-SSD actually works in practice is another question).We listened to our end users, and raised the price as a result.
Why would I care to have eSATA when there's Thunderbolt AND USB3.0? Doesn't seem to make sense. I don't even use eSATA now, even though two or three of my machines have it.
Be careful asking stuff like this on an Apple forum
But I completely agree with your post by the way. USB 3.0 will kill TB if prices remain this high. For an external drive USB 3.0 is only like a $10 premium now. It'll be standard on every external drive on the shelf in a few months.
£350 (including the cable, converted from $ and VAT added) is a ridiculous amount of money for the item. I'd find the extra £600 for the cinema display.
Who cares that you can't daisy-chain USB 3? Here's a 7-port USB 3.0 hub for $49. Hubs are superior too, since you can disconnect one device without breaking the chain. For <$20, you can get eSATA->USB3.0 adapters. If the new MBP has USB3.0, it will be way cheaper for the average user to get the speed they need without paying $450+
You will be spending nearly your entire budget on the motherboard itself with the controller and necessary pathing. ASUS just announced an add-in card to provide Thunderbolt support but the passthrough looks like something out of of a SCSI or SLI (the 3dfx one) "nightmare" from 1998.Show me a $450 computer with Thunderbolt and Firewire please