[ssafejava]

$300 is about 3 times what it should be, in my opinion. It's not much more than a fancy USB hub with audio & a NIC. USB 3.0 hubs with NICs are about $50-60, or one could easily use a regular USB 3.0 hub and attach a USB NIC, sound card, etc. Perhaps not as clean but a hell of a lot cheaper.

Even worse, the price is not really $300 - in order to use it, you'll need a thunderbolt cable which is nearly $40 (!).

There are few to no storage solutions that can benefit from thunderbolt over USB 3.0 and the whole ecosystem reeks of greed and vendor lock-in. No, thanks.

[venus]

What are you smoking? You cannot get anything even remotely similar for $100.

> one could easily use a regular USB 3.0 hub and attach a USB NIC, sound card, etc. Perhaps not as clean but a hell of a lot cheaper

Great, go and string together your tangle of bargain basement crap all over your desk. The whole point of these docks is to not do that.

You guys are not in the target market. I'm surprised you even have macs.

[beedogs]

The cable costs $40 because there are two discrete processors at either end. Intel charges about $20 each for those processors. The margins on Thunderbolt cables are probably a lot worse than you'd think.

[commandar]

It doesn't matter why the cable is $40, just that you need a $40 cable to use a $300 dock.