Henge Dock for Mac

Keeping my desk clean and organized is always hard to do with the spaghetti like mess of wires coming off my laptop.  Apple has not introduced a docking station for their MacBook line so I have always relied on my iCurve laptop stand to assist the the clutter.   I found an interesting concept from Henge Docks which has made a nice do-it-yourself kit for making a functional docking station.  It helps that it looks cool too when you are done.

Rather than using a “master port” like most Dell or IBM docking stations do to clip into the Henge Dock merely utilizes the ports already on your laptop with normal cables.  You pick the cables you need and can use the ones they provide (nice extenders) or provide your own.  I do not use my mic for example so I didn’t need to bother hooking that one up.  You line up each port and there is a screw that securely holds each cable in place.  Then you just slide your laptop into the sleeve and seat each connection gently in place.  Voila! Your done.

I bought my first Henge Dock for the office and it worked well.  After about 15-20 minutes of tinkering to get each cable to seat properly I was golden.  I then bought a 2nd dock for at home and after spending 2-3 hours tinkering I still could not get the display port to seat properly.  I contacted Henge’s support and they sent me a nice help document that suggested everything I already tried.   Having two docks, same computer with different results was not a good experience. One of the suggestions is to leave your laptop in the dock to help the dock form to your specific laptop.  I’m not sure physics of a solid object work this way but I’ m giving it a try.  For now I have a nice holder for my laptop and I put each cable in myself (seating the laptop 180 degrees from the normal direction).