Henge Docks’ Horizontal Docking Station ($499) remains one of the coolest and most powerful docking stations we’ve seen for the MacBook Pro. While it doesn’t come cheap, you’re getting what you pay for here, providing your MacBook Pro with Retina Display with a solid and attractive “home base” on your desk and a ton of extra ports to go with it. If you regularly hook up your MacBook to an external monitor in your home or office and have a lot of external accessories, it’s a much more elegant solution than juggling cables and smaller hubs — you just drop your MacBook Pro into the Horizontal Dock’s base and all of the necessary connections automatically extend from the sides into the appropriate ports on your MacBook.
When you’re ready to hit the road, a press of the button or click of a menu bar app will automatically eject all of your mounted external drives from within macOS and then retract the connectors to disconnect from the dock. It’s so slick and effortless that it borders on magical.
The Horizontal Dock is available in versions for the 13” and 15” MacBook Pro with Retina Display models, with a new mode for the USB-C equipped 2016 MacBook Pros expected to arrive this spring.
Both of the current models provide a total of thirteen expansion ports, including two separate audio outputs, an SD card reader, a Mini DisplayPort, Gigabit Ethernet, ThunderBolt 2, HDMI, and six USB 3.0 ports. Power is provided by the Horizontal Dock as well using its own 127W/150W power supply included in the box, so you can keep your MacBook’s own power supply ready to go in your laptop bag rather than having to purchase a second one or always deal with taking the one from your desk with you. While the Horizontal Dock is a bit pricey, if you have the desktop peripherals to make use of all of the ports it offers, the savings on a second power adapter and the one or more hubs you’d otherwise need can definitely offset the price.
