These days, having a laptop and a desktop computer is overkill.  Why so?  The laptops of today, especially the Macbook Pros, are powerful enough that there really isn’t a feat it can’t perform; video editing, number crunching and graphics rendering.  That said, a larger screen never hurts or does a variety of perphiral to complement your laptop, such as a printer, hard drive and so forth.  But seriously, who wants to plug in all those devices one at a time when you return to your home base?

Belkin is targeting the latest generation of Macbook owners with an autumn release of the Thunderbolt Express Dock.  We took a brief look at it at CES 2012 and we were impressed to say the least.  The finish and weight of the device is something we relish to hold in our hands again.  The dock itself jacks into your lappy via Thunderbolt and supports Gigabit Ethernet, 3x USB 2.0 ports, a Firewire 800 port, a 3.5mm headphone jack and two thunderbolt ports  (one upstream and one downstream) for daisy chaining other devices.  But that’s not what we really loved about this dock.  In addition to all of these wonderful ports you’ll also found an HDMI port, allowing you to easily connect your Macbook Air to not just an LCD monitor, but a LCD or Plasma TV.

There is one small caveat, though.  It will cost $299 when it launches later this year.