robbieduncan said:
Those were exactly what I was thinking of when I stated the that they would break the smooth design. Look at the bottom of a Thinkpad. It's a mess of spring loaded doors, screws etc. Look at the bottom of a Powerbook. It has the battery and a single screwed door for RAM. That's it.
OK, I have two Thinkpads. Turning over my X40 now... I see -- a single access door for RAM and miniPCI access, and the docking interface hidden underneath a springloaded trap door. The battery takes some real estate but it interfaces from the back not the bottom. The only other things on the bottom are locking releases for the battery, screws to remove the keyboard, rubber feet, and the required FCC labels. Oh, and some venting holes.
Frankly, I don't care how much stuff is on the bottom. I don't spend much time looking at the bottom of my laptops. Maybe if I had a highly elevated glass table I would worry about it? My concerns with the bottom are over intake/exhaust for the CPU, making sure they don't get clogged when used on a soft surface such as pants, a tablecloth, carpeting, a bedspread, etc... and that if some water spills nearby it has enough elevation to avoid damage.
In addition those sort of things do add weight and complexity to the design. You need additional logic chips to control the dock function. You need to split the external monitor port out to the dock when it's in use and the DVI port whn it's not (and the same for other ports)...
The X40 I have weighs a mere 2.7 pounds (with the small 4 cell battery) and is 0.8 inches thick. By contrast, the 12" Powerbook weighs 4.7 pounds and is 1.18 inches thick. The Powerbook is already an obese porker WITHOUT docking hardware, the Thinkpad a svelte greyhound in comparison WITH a dock connector. I can cede the point that it adds cost; but then again, so does the glowing Apple on the lid of the Powerbook, which is completely a vanity thing with zero functionality.
yg17 said:
Windows laptops have turned me off from docks alltogether. In a computer lab here on campus, we have some Dell laptops that are docked. Half of the time when you dock/undock them, Windows locks up. Granted, I'm sure OSX would never have this problem, but it's just turned me off of the dock idea alltogether.
If a computer is stationary, I'd agree you can get by without a dock. And I'll also agree Dell laptops are terrible in general, but especially with hot undocking. Others aren't so bad. My thinkpad has a soft eject to undock, and never locks up. Worst case it will auto-hibernate to prevent damage. The worst I can say is that when I use the serial port in the dock it won't let me eject, so I have to force the undock with a lever, and then it just complains about it and goes on. My HP laptop has no problem docking/undocking at all, but it uses the single wired connector mentioned above.
But the way I use my laptops for work is this: I have a machine I use as a desktop, basically, it sits in the dock and I use it for office tasks and development. But then I have meetings several times a week where I take the laptop into a conference room for notes and presentations. Also I make trips to offsite locations every few months where I need my development environment with me, including plugfests hosted overseas. My laptop has to fill the role of a desktop but still be a laptop. When it's docked, I use my 20" flat panel, serial port for debugging embedded applications, ethernet, etc. But it has to be ready to hit the road on a minute's notice.
Anyway, I'm glad that there are other people out there who agree with me that a dock would be useful. Perhaps we should start a petition
