Products I Want But Haven’t Found

Posted by mitch on January 09, 2012
productivity

Please feel free to “borrow” the ideas below and bring them to market. I will happily beta test!

1. Built-in USB wall charger. (Edit 11-Feb-2012: See my follow-up post.) A 1-gang USB wall charger that installs in a standard electrical box, available in white with a Decora faceplace. I want 6 USB ports and zero outlets. Maybe also a version with 1 outlet and 3 USB ports. I would buy a lot of these, especially if they had a bit of surge suppression in them. I know about the FastMac USB plate and I have 2 or 3 of them sitting in a box, but they are ugly and don’t provide enough ports. I am using a 4-port USB wall charger in the interim. This particular model has a cheaply machined AC plug, so it often falls out of the wall socket, especially in hotels with often-used sockets.

2. Shaun Fynn’s paper tray system (pictured below; sorry for the poor link, but his site is Flash). Apparently this is no longer on the market. What I really love is the under-stated nature of the trays (no walls), the “rubber garden” for holding small items like pens, zero desktop footprint, and the arms for moving the trays around (so they can be pulled forward to retrieve or triage, and pushed back out of the way).

3. A way to drive 3×30″ displays from a 15″ MacBook Pro. Village Tronic is working on a Thunderbolt enclosure. Hopefully it comes out, doesn’t suck, and will solve this problem. I think SSDs, a Thunderbolt RAID, and something like this might let me stop buying desktop computers.

There’s probably more, but these came to mind this morning.

  • Ish

    +1 for 3×30″ displays.  The current crop of MacBook Pros are the first I consider fast enough to replace my desktop, as they are in fact faster and my desktop is still fast enough.  However, I’m currently sitting in front of 3×24″ displays, and the only thing holding me back from the pro is the ability to drive 3 displays at full speed.  I’ve tried the Matrox boxes, but they fail to deliver the true behaviour of 3 displays.  

  • Marc

    Have a look at: http://www.anandtech.com/show/5352/msis-gus-ii-external-gpu-via-thunderbolt

    Looks interesting, but there is no external power-supply.

  • Me
  • Martin

     Hey Mitch, nice blog, I came across it while researching my office remodel. With respect to No. 2 above you shoud be able to get them @ http://bpfonline.co.uk/show_product.asp?id=5345&catid=10897 I intend on buying some equipment from these guys when I start fitting out the office.

  • http://www.biscade.com/ Mitch Haile

    Thanks for the link…. £81 is steep, but I was willing to go for it until I hit the £50 shipping cost for going to the US.  :-