If you’ve been longing for a Thunderbolt dock for your MacBook or Ultrabook, but felt left out in the cold because you could only find 10 Gb/s Thunderbolt docks, you can now come to a warm place. Belkin has announced its Thunderbolt 2 Express Dock HD, which follows a similar idea as the original but sports Thunderbolt 2 for a bandwidth of 20 Gb/s with extra display connectivity.
The new dock comes with two Thunderbolt 2 interfaces, which will allow you to daisy chain up to five additional devices. It also has an HDMI port, support for a 4K display and three USB 3.0 interfaces (one of which is at the front of the dock), along with a Gigabit Ethernet port, a rear audio-out jack and a front headphone/microphone combo jack. In short, this gives you all the connectivity you’ll need for a basic desktopenvironment, and you can link it to your laptop over just a single Thunderbolt cable.
It might not entirely make sense to buy an expensive dock to avoid having to plug in a couple of cables, but note that there are plenty of Apple devices that simply don’t have a lot of on-board connectivity, and additional ports might be worth a lot of dough to some people. The Belkin Thunderbolt 2 Express Dock HD works with the iMac, Mac Pro, Mac Mini, MacBook Air, MacBook Pro, MacBook pro with Retina Display and any other system with a Thunderbolt 2 port.
Belkin priced the Thunderbolt 2 Express Dock HD at $299 in the US. The original Thunderbolt Express Dock has been lowered in price to $199, and it now comes with a 1 meter Thunderbolt cable, too.
