Making full use of your Mac’s thunderbolt port has been an expensive business until now, with the only dock option being a $US999 Apple display. Thankfully, Belkin is finally releasing its Thunderbolt Express dock in September 2012.
In terms of functionality, it packs three USB 2.0 jacks, one Firewire 800, one HDMI, one Gigabit Ethernet, one 3.5-mm audio jack and a pair of Thunderbolt ports (one for carrying 10Gbps bi-directional data to your laptop and the other for daisy-chaining another Thunderbolt device). Sadly, there’s no USB 3.0, but it does provide an incredibly neat solution for docking your laptop.
There seems to be some disagreement on pricing, with The Verge quoting a $US299 price tag, while TechCrunch claims that those details are as-yet unannounced. We’ll keep you posted as the correct details emerge.
Update: The dock officially costs $US299. [The Verge, TechCrunch]