“No, no, no,” you said when you saw Satechi’s 7 Port Aluminum Hub on iLounge + Mac earlier this year. “Seven extra USB ports for my Mac is not enough. I must have 10 ports.” If that plea sounds familiar, consider yourself lucky: Satechi heard you and is ready with a solution. Bear witness to the new 10 Port USB 3.0 Premium Aluminum Hub ($65), an even larger hub with a downright wacky collection of 10 ports in a row. Look carefully and you’ll notice that seven of the ports are blue, and three are red. Those last three are called “Super Charging” ports, though they’re not quite as super as one might imagine.
Satechi’s design is actually a combination of the prior seven-port hub—all USB 3.0 ports, aided by an included wall adapter and connected to your computer—with three new ports that are purely for charging. One of the three ports offers tablet-ready 2.1-Amp output, while the other two are capped at 1-Amp, better-suited to iPods and pre-2014 iPhones. The idea is apparently to remove your need to plug your Apple devices into a computer for charging, while also offloading them from the standard USB hub so that it can focus on faster USB 3.0 devices. This new hub continues to match the aluminum bodies of Macs, though now with white rather than black accents.
