CES 2024: Satechi Debuts Thunderbolt 4 Hub, 145W USB-C Charger and More

The new Hub for the Mac Mini supports NVMe...!

Ok now... this is a very compelling for those who don't want to pay the Apple premium for upgraded storage. You can get 4TB of excellent speed for 1/5th of Apple's price now.

Why is the stand & hub not Thunderbolt? What's the first thing you want to add to your new mac mini or studio? Well, a studio display, but the *second* thing is fast storage at less than apple's abusive prices, and wouldn't it be nice if it wasn't dangling out of the back in an untidy mess. Like, why would you have an nvme enclosure and cap it at 10GB/s?

In looking at reviews for the previous mini hub, it seemed like people had problems with the hub just not turning on. Anyone here dealt with that? I’m interested in buying one, but want it to work correctly most of the time.

I have the current hub on my Studio M2 and both the SSD and attached USB keys drop off the bus on a regular basis. Pretty annoying, especially since I was using the SSD for media storage during editing.
If I knew the issues had been fixed on this version I’d get one to replace it.

Why is the stand & hub not Thunderbolt?

That would be better, but would probably double the price - there are stackable thunderbolt options available, eg: (I don't have one, so not a personal recommendation):

https://www.owc.com/solutions/ministack-stx

Thing is, although TB can be much faster in some situations, not every use-case will actually take advantage of that.

Like, why would you have an nvme enclosure and cap it at 10GB/s?

(That would be 10Gb/s - small 'b' or 1.25 GB/s)

Because many people are happy with a cheap, relatively slow (by modern standards) SSD for backup, media library or document storage, and even if you ignore the speed, NVMe is taking over from SATA and offering more bytes-per-buck.

Anyway, most general workloads don't get close to the "peak sustained transfer speed" - and if you're looking to stream raw high-def video or are constantly copying multi-gigabyte datasets then this is not the product for you (and you probably should have got a M2 Pro or a Mac Studio with more TB ports). Even the slowest SSD is night and day c.f. the good old spinning rust hard drives that people are upgrading from.

I think the main "gotcha" with this is not the 10 Gb/s cap on the drive itself, but that everything connected to this hub is sharing the same 5-10Gbps USB 3 stream so if the drive is in constant use and you hang high-bandwidth USB peripherals off it you'll probably see a performance drop. If that's a problem for you then you need an all-thunderbolt solution. Many people won't notice.

That's the problem that Thunderbolt/USB 4 faces - USB 3.1 is "good enough" for the majority of users, so there isn't the critical mass of sales needed to bring down Thunderbolt prices.

The new Hub for the Mac Mini supports NVMe...!

Ok now... this is a very compelling for those who don't want to pay the Apple premium for upgraded storage. You can get 4TB of excellent speed for 1/5th of Apple's price now.

Just buy a TB NVMe enclosure.

why didn’t they do a usbc only hub?

For some reason dock/hub manufacturers still love to spam USB-A instead of gradually shifting to USB-C.

A few thoughts on the stand and hub and not being USB-C only (or mainly). First off, the hub's predecessor was known for use with the Mac Mini, though it could be used with other Macs. The Mac Mini was (and is) a machine that targeted users who already had some older gear, like a keyboard, mouse and monitor (granted, some might buy these things new, but many people already had some or all of them). The Mac Mini was also originally a cheaper Mac than a 27" iMac, and nowadays it's a cheaper Mac than a Mac Studio.

In other words, while it's come a long way, the Mac Mini is a budget desktop Mac for people who already have some Mac-compatible computer gear. Many such customers want to maximize the use of what they have, and minimize spending on new accessories. This is a budget dock (vs expensive Thunderbolt docks) with a clean, stylish look.

A lot of people have some gear with USB-A port cables. USB-A to Lightning to charge a prior generation iPhone or iPad. An SD card reader. The receiver for a wireless mouse/or keyboard. Scads of cheap fairly high capacity thumb drives.

I agree we're in transition to a USB-C world, but there are a lot of USB-A peripherals still out there. Making it Thunderbolt would jack up the price, and there are already Thunderbolt docks. Using dongles would defeat the clean, stylish, Mini-matching look.

More USB-C ports would be nice.