I've been wanting to get a USB hub to use with my Mac while I'm at work. It's not something I absolutely needed, but between my cell modem, external hard drive, various thumb drives, and printer, I often ran out of available ports. About six weeks ago while trawling the interwebs I ran across this and had to get one. I got my order in the day before Apple sicced its lawyers on the manufacturer and since I never received a confirmation email I was beginning to wonder if I was ever going to receive it. So imagine my surprise when it showed up in my mailbox last Friday.
It's understandable while Apple went after the company. It looks (right down to the packaging) like something Apple would make—if they made stuff like this. But despite the superficial resemblance to a genuine Apple product, once I got it out of the box it was obvious this was not made by Cupertino.
The fit and finish was a bit off. The small USB cable that came with it had bits of excess plastic still attached, and the light-up logo (while cute) was not evenly illuminated (even though it appears that way in photos) as you'd expect from a genuine Apple product. On the whole, kind of cheesy. But then, what do you expect from a company that produced not one, but two Steve Jobs action figures?
I was even more disappointed when I actually plugged it in and attempted to use my peripherals. Maybe it's a problem endemic to non-externally powered USB hubs, but my modem wouldn't work. It would show up on the Mac, but would stay stuck at "initializing." My external hard drive wasn't recognized. Hell, even the printer kept telling me it was offline. And it wasn't like I tried to plug everything into it at once; this behavior was exhibited when only a single item was attached to it.
To its credit, It did work fine with thumb drives, however, as well as powering and syncing my iPhone, so I guess it wasn't a total loss. And I'm sure I could easily double what I spent for it by putting it up on eBay…