Have a (Mac) notebook dock/stand you really like?

A few days ago I ordered a top-of-the-line 15 MacBook Pro and a 24 LED Cinema Display (which means I have a Mac Pro, a MacBook Air, and a 23 Apple Cinema Display for sale; email me if interested), and am now on the hunt for a dock or stand.

When I say dock/stand, I’m not referring to something to place the notebook in/on when it’s not on my desk (e.g., something like Belkin’s CushTop, for which I wrote a glowing review last year),1 but rather a stand to use when it’s on my desk and piped to the external display.

Without question, the best thing I’ve found so far is Balmuda’s Floater. I’m utterly in love with its design (surprise!) and obvious structural integrity, and that it can be resized to handle notebooks of various thicknesses certainly doesn’t hurt it in the future-proofness department. I of course get a warm, fuzzy feeling from the fact that the internal surfaces are covered with very thin sheets of silicon that protect the computer without interfering with cooling performance and that the gap between the panels (i.e., where the computer sits) is machined to be within a tolerance of .1 millimeters! Not surprisingly though, all that beauty, style and utility comes at a steep cost: $300. Another issue is that current shipping delays are from two to four weeks!

I’ve looked at Power Support’s Docking Stand, and while it probably works, there’s just no way it can be as stable the Floater (not least because the Floater weighs nearly two pounds), and it most definitely doesn’t look as good. Further, I can’t find any pictures of it other than those provided by the manufacturer, which are crap,2 and I’m worried that it won’t fit perfectly the new unibody MacBook Pro (the last thing I want is the machine leaning to a particular side).3

Are you aware of a stand that maybe hasn’t crossed my radar? I’d prefer it to be vertical because it looks better (IMHO) and has a much smaller desktop footprint. Also, I’ve no desire to use both displays at once, and so stands like Griffin’s Elevator are of little interest to me.

(Alright, who am I kidding, I likely will buy the Floater, but if there’s something else out there that can match, or at least approximate its features and looks, I’d like to check it out before blowing $300 on a freakin’ stand.)

I also like the design of Logitech’s new Comfort Lapdesk, but haven’t used it or seen much written about it. ↩

Note to manufacturers: most of us want to see large pictures of your product, from all angles, before we throw down our credit cards. Not sure when or where the decision is made to give potential customers tiny thumbnails and nothing else, but it’s the wrong decision. ↩

The new Floater T3 was designed specifically for the unibody model. ↩