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Comment by Apreche | Hacker News Reader

This is one thing I never really understood. Apple really cares a lot about aesthetics. In the store their devices all look fantastic standing alone surrounded by white/black.

But when you see an Apple device in the real world, it looks like crap. Why? Because it's tangled up in this octopus of cables and external doodads.

In my office I have a Lenovo X220, and everyone else has Macs, mostly Macbooks. I have a docking station, so all my cables other than mouse and keyboard are behind my desk out of sight and mind. The co-worker with the iMac has the same situation. Everyone else has a Macbook Pro or Air. The entire left sides of their desk are a mess of cables spewing out the side of the Macbooks. It ruins everything.

Hiding everything inside of the beautiful box keeps it pretty, so I've never really understood why Apple loves external devices so much more than internal.

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I think that's a problem that's rather unique to our field. Most people I know who have MacBooks don't have them in a "docked" configuration ever. It sits on their desk where the most that comes out of them is the power adapter and a USB cable.

I hear ya though, my Macbook Pro doubles as my home development machine, so when I'm "docked" it's just a morass of cables. It really would be nice if Apple lived up to the "Pro" moniker and gave us a reasonable dock.

I did order a Henge dock a while back, maybe I should actually unpack it and set it up...

The dock is a Thunderbolt Display

You really should, I've got one at my office and one at home.

They want you to buy their Thunderbolt display as a dock. You connect two cables - power and Thunderbolt to computer, and everything else to the display. It has few usb, firewire, ehternet, audio (built-in speakers), camera...

Awesome. So now your monitor is a morass of cables and plugs.

It's a lot easier to hide cables coming out of the back of a monitor than it is from the side of a laptop. Plus, it's basically what a typical dock does.

Plus it's not common for an external monitor to move around with you. It's just two cables to unplug when you go mobile.

I agree, I use my rMBP connected to a second monitor, network cable and with an external keyboard and mouse, so I have cables and adapters vomiting all over my desk. When I come in to work in the morning I spend a good few minutes connecting all that crap up and sorting the cables out so I have some space to work.

The endless adapters definitely add more clutter and complexity to the setup.

With my old Dell I just plopped it into the dock which kept most of that stuff sorted out and pointed away from my desk. I had the same amount of connectors, just organized better.

I recently moved to a bluetooth keyboard and mouse and finally got my wifi setup so now it's just power and monitor and it looks much more sane.

Of course now I have to make sure my mouse and keyboard are turned on and wait for them to connect which means I'm sometimes logging into my computer from it's own keyboard first to fiddle with the bluetooth stuff.

I'm considering getting an external optical drive which of course will reverse this trend, but for now I can't burn any disks when I need to.

Thunderbolt Dock would be the dream...

I settle for an external USB hub, wireless keyboard and mouse, and outboard audio. It does enough to reduce the number of things I have to plug.

Here you go, living the dream!

http://www.belkin.com/us/p/P-F4U055

http://www.matrox.com/docking_station/en/ds1/

(Matrox one is kinda lame)

Only $249 and $299! Dreams are expensive....

There are docking stations for MacBooks, it's just that Apple doesn't make them. One of several: http://www.hengedocks.com/

> Hiding everything inside of the beautiful box keeps it pretty, so I've never really understood why Apple loves external devices so much more than internal.

If you mean this criticism in regards to the Mac Pro, expansion cards usually have cables coming out of them as well, so the Mac Pro is no different from traditional desktops in that regard. SSD on PCI is obviously an exception here, but that's a relative newcomer.

As far as laptop computers, the reason you have a dock and others don't is that you purchased a dock, and the others didn't. So perhaps the Apple users you know care less about aesthetics than you think they do.

Does Apple make a laptop dock for a Macbook?

Nope, but third-parties are now making thunderbolt docks[1]. These are useful when you have your monitors on a VESA Mount.

1) I'm having a Déjà vu moment comparing these to the old Atari 850 Interface http://www.atarimuseum.com/computers/8bits/400800/atari850.h...

Their "dock" is the Thunderbolt display, which is more elegant than a traditional dock.

Except that with the new Mac Pro, you'll still have all the cables that would previously have come out of expansion cards, but they'll be coming from a whole bunch of external boxes with their own cables, power adapters, etc.

Then there's the question of storage; previously local hard disks could be installed entirely internally, with no external cables, whereas now they all have to be external. Thankfully it should be possible to bus-power those if you don't care about daisy-chaining them.

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