This product is about 3 years too late. That's how long ago it was announced
http://wp.me/p1xtr9-17uD
I don't care about an optical drive, I don't think I have a disc anywhere anyways. I do like the internal capacity for (2) 2.5" drives. Never been a fan of Esata and I sold all my FW 800 stuff long ago.
"So for those reasons, I'm out" (Any other Shark Tank fans out there?)
My current setup is
Caldigit Thunderbolt box
Caldigit T3 thunderbolt raid
Caldigit usb 3.0 external drive
2 monitors (2560x1440) one 1080P,
Lexar Workflow 4 card reader USB 3.0
OWC Mercury Rack Pro USB 3.0 (4) 2TB Drives
All plugged into my Retina MBP with one TB cable. I have all the ports on my MBPr available if I ned to plug in something else quickly and the Caldigit USB 3.0 port in the front is being used by my iPhone.
That all WORKS on one bus??
I don't understand the need for docks these days. With the possible exception of an additional display (I don't have that), I don't see the need to attach anything to the computer in these modern days. Printers, additional storage, tv, speakers, etc. - I have them all, but not one is attached to my Mac. Everything's fine on the my network and works with everything else. We really need to move on people.
You obviously don't deal with huge content files that need ASAP and time-dependent delivery. Other people do, and going all wireless is not a solution for them. You're incorrectly presuming your own use case is universal (or should be treated as such).
Clearly there are use cases that still require wires these days and I have acknowledged those. Still you must agree that this is not the direction of the future.
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Mice, Keyboards, Trackpads -- I went wireless with them when I bought my iMac in 2012. Still using the same computer, but upgraded to the magic version this year to eliminate the need for batteries.
[...]
At work, I have a network cable, a power cord and two monitors hardwired to my computer. Nothing else. At home, my desktop has a network cable and a power cord. Although I can wifi to my nikon, i do use a card reader when I need to download a bunch of photos (once a month or so) At home, my laptop has a power cord when recharging is needed.
I understand that we cannot be completely wireless today, but I would hope that if you look at the not too distant future you can see that wireless everything and everything in the cloud are things that a lot of companies are pumping a great deal of energy into. When I go to invest my money on technology, I try to solve my Today problems but always with an eye to Tomorrow. Solving a Today problem while clinging to Yesterday means that your transition to the future will be more difficult.
You're claiming to acknowledge people having different use-cases than you, but then you repeat why you think those people are behind the times.
• not everyone wants to throw away and re-purchase mouse and keyboard when the sealed-in rechargeable batteries become useless. There's some sense behind laptops and phones not having replaceable batteries while they're forcibly obsoleted (yes, I mean that literally) by software "upgrades". Mice and keyboards do NOT apply here. My wired Apple aluminum keyboard with numeric keys will continue to be useful long after the computers it has attached to have been recycled. Disposable mice and keyboards are environmentally and economically awful (but great for Apple's sales figures).
• there's not enough bandwidth for everything to be wireless, especially in shared spaces. This is a fact of physics. Companies like Verizon are actively rejecting this physical fact of reality because they get more profit selling wireless contracts than by maintaining physical infrastructure of copper and fiber (they've given up rolling out fiber, in fact, failing to roll out all they promised to roll out when they were getting millions of dollars in government subsidies, so if you don't have access to their FiOS today, you're probably never going to).
• people that need huge data to be transfered on time will always have that requirement. Cloud services and wireless networks will likely never catch up to this use requirement. They're certainly not even close today. If you think it's fine enough, you're not the kind of use-case that needs wires. That's fine for you, and for people like you. If you still want to be consuming content (music, television, movies, etc), then you have to allow for content creators to be served by wires (or optical cables; where are all of our fiber optics?? This isn't the future we were told about!). Hell, internet service providers in the USA have abysmal speed and reliability ratings. Througg exactly what conduit do you expect this magical wireless internet access to be provided, so that everyone can have blazing fast cloud access for the terabytes of time-dependent data to be delivered while editing 4K movies?
• musicians using tools with hundreds of gigabytes of sample data cannot and never will be storing that wirelessly, and certainly not on some magical mythical super cloud. If I can't run BFD2 from a 5400 rpm hard drive, I'm sure as hell not going to be running it from a wireless connection.
It's as if you think people should cripple their work processes just to please "where everything is headed"? Where everything is headed, in your examples, appears to be based entirely on the lowest common denominator end-user/consumer or basic text and charts-based office space. But even there, that path is not sustainable. If everyone in your building uses wireless signals for everythung, you're not going to have a great time (well, your IT help desk slaves will be miserable for sure, since they'll have practical experience in knowing why their managers' "all wireless" plan was ludicrous). In that "where things are headed" scenario, really, it's all headed for a mess (if it's expected that wires will be eliminated entirely).
If you want the world of the future, you ought to consider the hard limits imposed by physical reality. We are still bound by physics. Science fiction doesn't care sbout such things, so your world will NEVER be like you see on tv (and I really can't stand the obsession with "holographic" interfaces; beyond ludicrous but also a huge and popular fad in tv, making uneducated people think it's inevitable; it's not).
Eventually, once everything is the way corporations want it (with their ability to reap planet-sized profits with near-zero infrastructure or investment), people will be paying a tax for the "privilege" to stress over everything being barely functional at all. Blithely promoting that future, as your posts feel to me, is what has me irritated enough to write all of this.
