Linedock is a device designed to deliver power and salvation from what its creators refer to as “dongle hell.”
It’s a massive messiah at two pounds with nine ports, a 20,000mAH battery with 100 W pass-through charging and an onboard SSD with up to 1 TB of storage.
A featured product at CES this week, Linedock’s form factor heads in the opposite direction of most hubs, external hard drives or power banks. It is not small.
Linedock is available in two sizes, 13 and 15 inches (still in the works) to support those sizes of MacBook Pro laptops (it is also compatible with the MacBook Air).
Photo: Linedock
The creators are two friends with soldering skills and open Sundays. They were looking for a project and, as they say on the website, “it very quickly got out of hand.”
The size and prices may scare away some, but the specs may get them to cozy up to this mighty accessory.
The dock’s featured ports are three USB-C, three USB 3.0, one HDMI, one Mini display port and an SD card reader. It can also charge up to six devices at the same time. The SSD will also let users boot Windows or Linux on a Mac with just a few clicks.
“Dongle hell” refers to the small accessories needed to plug in peripheral devices into USB-C-only machines, such as the MacBook Pros. Depending on a user’s needs, tasks could require a couple of different dongles or hubs to plug older gadgets into a newer Mac.
A Linedock without storage runs $299. One with a 256 GB SSD is $399 and the 1 TB model is $749. The product can be ordered now.
