A neat hub designed to provide 12-inch MacBook owners with a useful way to connect existing devices has just hit $670k on Kickstarter – somewhat in excess of its modest $35,000 goal.
The Hub+ plugs into the single USB-C port of the MacBook and turns that into two USB-C ports, 3 conventional USB-A sockets, a mini DisplayPort and an SDXC card slot. The sleek device offers a choice of silver, space gray and gold to match your MacBook …
Backing the project lets you reserve a Hub+ for $79, saving $20 on the planned retail price. Some reward levels also offer mini adapters for USB-A and HDMI. You get a choice of a 9mm thick device with just the ports, or a 13mm version with a built-in battery capable of providing a bit of extra power to your MacBook, or charging an iPhone or other USB-charged device when used on its own.
There’s no Ethernet port, so if your WiFi connection isn’t fast enough, you’ll still need a separate adapter for that – like the Kanex one we recently reviewed. SanDisk also has a neat USB key with dual -A and -C connectors.
It’s looking likely that USB-C will become a standard port across the Mac range after Intel announced that it was adopting the connector for Thunderbolt 3.
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This looks good but somehow it seems to me (and I don’t have a MacBook) that if you’re going small and light plugging an octopus in defeats the purpose. Maybe just get a 13″ MacBook Pro and be done with it.
Or maybe that dongle sits at home on the desk, so you can just unplug the one usb c cord and take the laptop on the go.
Right, of course. While it seems like a great solution, the idea of a dock with a lot of stuff on a desk seems to go against the grain of what the MacBook is about (ultimate portability). But, I take your point for sure.
“the idea of a dock with a lot of stuff on a desk seems to go against the grain of what the MacBook is about”
Sorry, but it’s an utterly nonsensical point. Retina MacBook can be used in “full desktop” mode when connected to a monitor/USP peripherals. The same MacBook can be easily taken mobile by unplugging a single USB-C cable. The two use cases are not mutually exclusive and there nothing that goes “against the grain of what MacBook is about”.
Love Mac computers. Just very annoying that Apple seems to be giving the middle finger to users that need to use wired peripherals just to shave a couple mm and put a bigger battery in the MacBook. More I read about this new laptop, the less I like it.
I think part of it is about pushing computing forward. No doubt that almost everything will be wireless in the future. And it’ll only happen as fast as companies make it happen.
The real BS here is that just one more port would have solved the whole (well most) of the problem. You HAVE TO HAVE POWER when using it as a desktop, and that leaves no printer, no Ethernet, no hard wired Time Capsule – that is just a middle finger to users for no real reason. You could easily put a USB 3 -C on the other side, or even two next to each other on the same side. Totally irresponsible and arrogant on Apple’s part.
If only someone would in the world would invent:
* Wireless printer
* Wireless networking
*Wifi connection to Time Capsule.
Jesus please send us this great engineer to one day develop products that can accomplish the above.
I bet you also complain that your cheeseburger came with cheese on it. And that there was no way to remove the cheese from it to make a.. *gasp* hamburger!
I completely agree, I fell for the Macbook hard when it was introduced as i’ve always liked small laptops and this one just seemed to be the perfect one. Though after I bought it, I found myself using my Surface Pro 3 a whole lot more. I think I’m done with non-touch screen portable devices. Every single time I use my Macbook I kept thinking, how great would it be to fold the keyboard back and use it as a tablet. The lack of ports was also extremely annoying, I don’t mind dongles but this was just a little on the ridiculous side, I’m not alone on this either, three other people that I know who bought one also returned it or sold it. I did so as well after about a month of use. Actually I’ve sold most of my Apple gear except for my iPad as I like to use it for music creation. That’s it though as I’ve always really disliked iOS, just missing to many features that I simply can’t live without and I absolutely hate that my files are spread throughout the system, saved under the apps that created them. As such I would also never own an iPhone, something as basic as streaming a movie and still being able to use your phone just isn’t possible, also as a programmer I need to be able to login into my firms production servers during trading hours to keep an eye out on things using custom monitoring scripts, that being said, I don’t want to have to keep the terminal app in the foreground for 8 hours, I need to be able to minimize it without the fear that the OS will terminate it’s connections, as iOS does. I also only use apps that are crossed platform, so I wouldn’t have any need for Apple’s included apps, unfortunately I cannot change the default apps, this by the way is just wrong and extremely ant-competitive in my book, the EU went after Microsoft for bundling in Internet Explorer with XP, even though you could still change your default browser, this is much worse. No big lost though, I have a BlackBerry Passport which I just absolutely adore and I’ve preordered the new Turing Phone from Turing Robotics which is simply an awesome phone. As for my computers, I have a Surface Pro 3, Google Pixel 2, Nexus 9, a ThinkPad Yoga 12.5 with OSX, Arch Linux, Windows 10 installed, a custom workstation running Cent OS, OSX, Windows 10 and 5 Nvidia Shield TV’s with Linux installed and are in a cluster for GPU computing. The Thinkpad is actually a better Mac than the Macbook, everything works absolutely flawless, including the Wacom pen and touchscreen, features that I really wanted and Apple simply couldn’t provide. I will be replacing the Nexus 9 though with the new Google Pixel C when it comes out, it looks to be like the ultimate Android tablet as well as friggen gorgeous, this is why I’m interested in this little dock, I want to connect this tablet to a monitor, mouse, keyboard as well as all of my replica game controllers for the emulators. Since Android can display it’s desktop at the native resolution of my monitor, which is 4K and can dynamically change the DPI to reflect that of a traditional desktop, not huge like you get when you connect an iPad, also no black bars. It will make a great development machine to be used in conjunction with my Nvidia Shields. Right now one Shield is setup as the main node and as a desktop computer with all of the usual apps but I would really like to make it into just another node in th cluster, so I can utilize the full power of all five, managing everything through the Pixel C, which I will definitely be installing Linux on. The Nvidia X1 CPU is just a fantastic SOC, the GPU portition is pure aesomeness. I’ve already created a render farm for Blender, which actually runs extremely well on a Shield, I can encode a 25GB Bluray file to MP4 in under 30 minutes, in comparison my Macbook took over 9 hours to do, It actually runs my software faster than my previous mini desktop computer which had an i3. Though the real power comes from using the GPU in a cluster with CUDA at it’s core. I’ve been programming with Open CL and Cuda for about 5 years now, Cuda is hands down the best way to go, it’s not necessarily the speed but the programming time. I can write a program using CUDA, almost 50 percent faster than Open CL, there is just so many plugins, code online, better support, etc. The Shield TV also makes a great TV set-box, I could never own an Apple TV, like the iPad an iPhone, it’s just missing to many features that I want. Even something as simple as using wireless keyboard with a built in trackpad to be used when surfing on your TV isn’t possible. Also, I could never use such a device if I couldn’t install Kodi on, this app is an absolute must for me. Not only can I watch every TV channel that is available locally, but I also wacth TV from the US, UK, Australia, Germany, South Africa, etc. I can also record these shows for later viewing. I’m an ultra geek, a tinker, Apple just doesn’t cater to the likes of me, though I still really like OSX. However since I can run it on hardware that fits my needs, there just isn’t any reason to buy a machine from Apple. I took a long look at the Mac Pro but at the end of the day I just built my own monster machine, with two Intel Xeon 14 core CPU’s (ebay, 900 a piece), 64GB ECC ram, 512GB PCIE HD just for the OS’s, 4 600Gb 15000kbs SAS HD’s for storage, Intel Xeon Phi 3120a (I pretty much stole this card, seller on eBay put it up with no reserve, got it for 300 bucks), ASUS Xonar Essence STX, Nvidia Titan Z dual GPU (eBay buy) single slot (converted to water cooled) and two Nvidia single slot (also converted) 690’s flashed into Tesla K10’s graphic cards (yes, they act and perform like real Tesla cards, these GPU’s just utterly blow away the two D700’s that are in the Mac Pro to the point where it’s almost comical). I also paid almost 4 thousand dollars less than that of a fully configured Mac Pro that is practically twice as slow, almost 10x when you compare the graphics power. Plus I’m still able to run OSX, upgrade the machine with even more goodies. The only nice thing I would get from the Mac Pro is an attractive case. Also no, there won’t be an issue with compatibility or failures, I’ve built hundreds of custom machines with only one single failure in the last ten years, which turned out to be a bad memory chip in which I cured of by never again buying cheap RAM. I used to be a hardcore Apple user but it just started to feel like Apple was just doing the bare minimum. I have these two Nokia 360 bluetooth speakers, love them, I can take my BlackBerry and just touch them to switch the audio source from internal speaker. This id because of NFC, my iPad has NFC but it’s only there for Apple Pay, why can’t I use it with my speakers, doesn’t make sense, I’m sure a lot of you will have an answer for me but they won’t be logical, just excuses. That’s all I here nowadays as to why an Apple device can’t do something, app won’t run in the background on my iPad, well this is because it saves battery, really, I was running apps in the background with my Nokia 9500 back in 2004, lasted three days on a single charge. My BlackBerry Passport runs a terminal app in the background almost the entire day and it lasts a day and a half, easily. Still haven’t heard a decent one ad to why I can’t change my default apps in iOS, but why you can still use your other apps, yea but try attaching a file to an email while in another program, I don’t see my email client listed as a possible target or when I’m on a site and click on an email address, Apple’s email client opens up or when I click on a video file, iTunes opens up, I hate iTunes, if I had the chance I would delete everty single Apple app that came pre-installed. Why do I have to login to iCloud 50 times, I already did it once when I first setup the phone but no, every single app that supports iCloud wants me to do it again and again and again…. Why is there an app that controls how apps share with each other, can’t this be done automatically, when I click on Share can’t it just list those apps that are installed and compatible and there are still about 30 percent of my apps that arent listed. Especially when I want to save a file to OneDrive, God forbid I want to use a service other than Apple’s. Oops, this has gone on long enough. Thanks for reading this far, peace out.
Awesome product has gone kaput. Technically it was too hard to develop with existing chipsets. I wish the company all the best – they have been handling the situation well promising full refunds for Kickstarters.