In the world of tech accessories, there is a fine line between “complementary design” and “identity theft.” Satechi’s new Thunderbolt 5 CubeDock hasn’t just crossed that line; it has set up a permanent residence there, changed its name, and started claiming it’s the rightful heir to the Apple silicon throne. At first glance, you might mistake this $399.99 silver box for the new M4 Mac Mini. At second glance, you’ll realize it’s a hub that costs nearly two-thirds the price of the actual computer it’s trying to mimic, proving that in 2024, “looking like an Apple product” is a premium feature you can apparently put a mortgage on.

Let’s start with the most glaringly obvious “innovation” here: the price. Satechi is asking for $400 for a dock. For those keeping track at home, the base M4 Mac Mini—a literal entire computer with an industry-leading processor, RAM, and the ability to, you know, compute—starts at $599. Satechi is essentially selling a fancy aluminum dongle for 66% of the price of the machine it connects to. It’s the equivalent of buying a $40,000 trailer for a $60,000 truck. Sure, the trailer is nice, but one of these things actually has an engine, and the other is just an expensive place to keep your stuff.

The headline feature is, of course, Thunderbolt 5. Satechi is very excited to tell you that this dock supports speeds up to 120Gbps. That is truly impressive bandwidth for all the Thunderbolt 5 peripherals you definitely don’t own yet. Unless you’re a professional video editor working with multiple 8K uncompressed streams—at which point, why are you using a base Mac Mini?—you’re paying a massive “early adopter tax” for speed you literally cannot use. It’s like installing a Formula 1 transmission into a golf cart; you’re going to get to the next hole at exactly the same speed as everyone else, but you’ll feel much more technologically superior while doing it.

Then there’s the NVMe SSD enclosure. This is a classic “some assembly required” luxury. For $400, you get a slot. Not the storage, mind you—just the hole to put it in. By the time you buy a high-end NVMe drive that can actually take advantage of these speeds, you’ve spent enough money to have just upgraded the internal storage on your Mac Mini through Apple’s notoriously usurious upgrade pricing. Satechi has successfully created a way to make Apple’s $200-per-256GB storage tiers look like a bargain.

Aesthetically, the CubeDock is five inches of “Can I copy your homework?” “Yeah, just change it a little so the teacher doesn’t notice.” It’s designed to sit under or next to your Mac Mini, creating a silver stack of redundancy. If you stack them, you’ve doubled the height of your “compact” computer. If you place them side-by-side, your desk looks like an architectural model of a very boring office park.

The port selection is fine—if you’re living in 2021. We’re still getting 2.5Gb Ethernet in a $400 “pro” device? In an era where 10Gb Ethernet is becoming the standard for high-end creative workflows, providing 2.5Gb is like putting a speed limiter on a Ferrari. But hey, at least you get a microSD card slot, because apparently, we’re all still rocking point-and-shoot cameras from 2012.

Satechi has built a beautiful, high-performance box for a future that hasn’t arrived yet, at a price point that suggests they think we’ve forgotten what money is worth. It’s the perfect accessory for the person who wants their desk to look like they own two Mac Minis, but only wants one of them to actually work. If you have $400 burning a hole in your pocket and a desperate need to populate every single port on a spec sheet, the CubeDock is waiting. For everyone else, a $30 USB-C hub and a sense of financial responsibility will probably suffice.