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I can’t have been the only one who saw the potential for the Thunderbolt connection as the one cable to rule them all into your laptop, but it’s taken so damn long to realise that. Now, finally, Matrox has made it happen with it’s new DS1 dock. One Thunderbolt cable in; DVI/HDMI, Ethernet, USB 2 and 3.0, and headphone out, plus a mic port too. Brilliant.
It’s just a shame the Matrox DS1 clocks in at £200-odd, but when you compare it to the only other way to do the same thing currently available, the £900 Apple Thunderbolt display, it seems like a veritable bargain. Belkin was meant to be coming out with something similar, including an extra Thunderbolt port for daisy chaining, but that’s been pushed well back into 2013.
£200 might seem a bit steep, but if you primarily use your MacBook hooked up to a monitor, Ethernet and a butt-load of accessories, this is the thing for you. Santa, you’ve got your orders. [Matrox via MacRumors]
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Why so expensive?
That is a very good question. Probably because it’s Matrox and it has some sort of fancy circuitry in there.
The Belkin one was going to be silly money too, the circuit boards must be super fancy!
In my experience Matrox stuff has been absolutely bullet proof, so there’s that at least.
On a second thought, this could be due to the fact that, this is marketed for the Apple users
Because Thunderbolt is just a PCI-Express bus and Displayport interface on the same port. That means this thing is effectively a Thunderbolt controller, HDMI adapter, ethernet NIC, USB hub and audio DAC all rolled into a single box. That’s quite a lot of electronics.
It’s a fantastically versatile interface, but unfortunately Thunderbolt accessories will always be expensive for this reason. It’s a similar story with Lightning.
DVI, HDMI, Ethernet, headphone, mic and a single USB3 – I agree with all those, but surely the USB2 ports could have been USB3 instead?
There will most likely be a ‘pro’ edition which will feature another thunderbolt port as well as several USB3s I reckon..
Looks nice, but needs more firewire. Or some firewire. Firewire, basically.
Well you can get the TB>Firewire adaptor… oh wait, neither that nor this have pass through, enjoy running out of ports :@
I don’t actually have anything that has thunderbolt on it (I’m still using a 2009 MBP), but just thinking about the future. I have a couple of firewire audio cards and stuff that I need to hang on to.
Holding out for the belkin seems to be the way things are looking…
Ditto, have a firewire DAC and multiple firewire drives, most of those have eSATA so will probably just grab the TB>eSATA jobby which would result in faster speeds, shame about the card reader and DAC though.