Like many individuals lately, I earn a living from home and use a 16-inch MacBook Professional with an exterior show. I’ve been a long-time consumer of the OWC Thunderbolt Dock which lets me join my show and varied peripherals to the hub’s I/O ports, with solely a single cable plugged in to the laptop computer.
This dock has merely sat atop the desk, till just lately. I got here throughout an extra enchancment to my setup which helps declutter much more. Fairly merely, I found this cable administration tray that lets the dock sit on a shelf simply beneath the desk, so all of the mess is out of sight …
There are fancier cable administration trays you should buy. Standing desk aficionados love these shelfs that you simply actually screw into the underside of the desk. However, I had stayed away from these previously as I didn’t need something that everlasting.
What’s good concerning the cable administration tray linked above is that you simply don’t want a drill or to make holes into the desk floor in any respect. It simply options two little clamps, one on the left and one on the correct.
You don’t want any instruments to connect it. To put in, you merely flip the clamps together with your fingers to tighten them, and so they maintain on to the desk by way of smooth rubber pads. It could maintain up a good quantity of weight, greater than sufficient for a Thunderbolt dock and an influence extension lead. It feels sturdy and steady.
The tray has a wireframe mesh design so there’s ample holes to feed cables by way of, and it supplies enough air flow.
From above, all you see is the little tabs of the 2 clamps. I’ve a black coloured desk, so all of it blends in fairly neatly — there’s a bunch of producers making very comparable trays in all types of sizes and completely different colours. Clearly, in case you screwed in a everlasting shelf, you wouldn’t have these tabs seen in any respect. That’s the one small draw back to the clamp method.
You possibly can see how my desk now appears to be like from above and under with this setup:
That dock drives Ethernet, show out, USB microphone, wired keyboard and mouse, energy, Lightning and USB-C cables for my linked iOS gadgets, and extra. I simply put an influence extension lead on high of it that offers me 4 helpful plug sockets. And I not need to see any of it. I even have area to spare within the shelf, so I plan to jam some extra stuff in there in future as nicely.
As you’ll be able to see from the photographs, the overwhelming majority of the I/O mess is now fully hidden from view. For a sub-$30 workplace improve, I’m very pleased with the outcomes. Truly, the costliest a part of all of this was that I wanted to purchase an extended Thunderbolt cable that would attain from my laptop computer to beneath the desk.
FTC: We use earnings incomes auto affiliate hyperlinks. Extra.
