#rmbp

I was lucky enough to receive a phonecall to pick up some bottles! I dragged them all in, and the result was: 3,50€! Which is a great way to proceed towards reaching 400€, which is my next goal, really.

This, along with the updated price for a mid-2015 MacBookPro, brings us to a grand total of 375,30€ - and 11,44556%!.

Let’s get to that 400€, shall we?

It’s… still not possible.

I recently got a new Thunderbolt 3 Macbook Pro for work, which is great, except that it doesn’t have DisplayPort out.

I want to be able to bring it home (or to work) and use a single cable to connect it to power and all my peripherals, which currently include:

DisplayPort display

USB-A transmitter for a mouse

USB-A cable to Rode Podcaster

Gigabit Ethernet

You'd think, given the increasing ubiquity of (at least) USB-C gear, it would be easy to find a dock that I could plug everything into, and then connect to my Mac.

No such luck.

I had conducted a search about a month ago looking for options, but none seemed to exist. Today there are seemingly three, but none seem like great options. Let’s review:

Belkin Thunderbolt 3 Express Dock HD - $350.00 Though “temporarily out of stock” at the time of this posting, it’s very poorly reviewed so far (3 one-star, and 1 two-star reviews) with complaints that DisplayPort doesn’t work, it doesn’t support the USB Superdrive, and that the dock doesn’t support two external displays.

CalDigit Thunderbolt Station 3 - $299.99 Also unavailable/out of stock, this is a slightly odd solution in that it features 2 eSATA ports. It has been nicely reviewed by MacRumors and 9to5Mac, but there aren’t any user reviews yet, so we’ll have to see how it ends up. I can’t recommend it before it’s widely available, but it apparently begins to ship this week.

Elgato Thunderbolt 3 Dock - $299.95 If you’ve got to have a dock today, this seems like the best (only?) option. Of course, it’s not available on Amazon (in fact, the link they supplied to The Verge has reverted to the Thunderbolt 2 version), but it was well-reviewed by 9to5Mac and seems to be available for order on their website, but is out of stock with all the external vendors they recommend. Again, no user reviews mean I can’t recommend it, but it’s the one it’s possible to order right now.

What to do?

So the Apple Keynote happened. I thought, hehey, my 1Tb SSD MacBookPro that I’m saving for (3689€) will probably be cheaper. Or something.

Well, I thought wrong.

The whole device promptly vanished, both from the webs and from my Apple Store app wishlist.

So I made a new one. But 1TB SSD makes this device prohibitively expensive. So I had to settle for 512Gb. 

And then it’s 30€ cheaper. Yep. 30€ but the difference between 1Tb and 512Gb.

Let’s do the calculations again, shall we:

38,10/3659*100 = 1,041268106%