MacBook Pro is Not So Pro Without A Docking Station

What is it with Apple? They want to be taken seriously as a machine for professionals. They even go so far as to brand one of their lines of laptops as "Pro" (MacBook Pro), and then they ignore one of the most important tools for a pro laptop... a docking station or port replicator.

Many, many moons ago, it was common to have a desktop for your in-office work and a laptop for travel and work on the road. Well, not necessarily common for everyone, but if you had a laptop, it was usually your second/secondary computer, a stepchild to your desktop.

But in the past few years, the trend has moved toward dumping the desktop and using a laptop for everything. But as anyone who has owned a laptop without a docking station or port replicator has learned, this is a royal pain in the patootie.

Most people, when they work with the laptop at their desk, prefer the ease of a real mouse, real full-size keyboard, and real monitor. But imagine connecting and disconnecting each of those manually every time you need to leave your desk and take your laptop along. And most people aren't just plugging in those three... There may be a USB or Firewire cradle for your PDA, one for your music player, a cable for your speakers, and let's not forget the LAN cable and the power cable.

With a dock or port replicator, you connect the laptop... voila. Without one, you're connecting and disconnecting up to 8 or even 9 different cables every time you want to take the laptop off your desk or bring it back to the desk.

I've been wanting to switch to Mac and was pricing out a nice little 17" desktop replacement MacBook Pro. I did a search of Apple's site for a dock or port replicator and got nada. I searched Google and found one company selling a MacBook Pro dock, but it's for the 15" model and doesn't support FireWire 800.

When I went searching for a dock or port replicator for the 17" MacBook Pro, I found a number of forums where people told stories of how they wanted to switch, but the lack of a dock was a deal-breaker. And it wasn't just individuals, but small business owners who would have bought 10 or 20 Apple laptops, but instead had to settle for Lenovo or HP solutions because the docking station was just that important to them.

Perhaps Apple's done the research and concluded that it would be more expensive to produce and market a docking station than it would be worth. At least I hope that's the case. And I hope that they really crunched the numbers to come to that decision. Because, like a number of these other people, I'd like to switch, but the lack of a dock could end up being the deal-breaker that keeps me in the Windows world.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 5th, 2006 at 10:54 pm and is filed under Gadgets & Gizmos, Techno Thoughts.You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.