One of the things that migrating my desktop and giving away the first laptop I bought new reminds me is that for the past 8 years or so I've been using laptops as "portable desktops" by purchasing two port replicators/docking stations for them and putting one on my desk at work and one on my desk in my home office. Moving my desktop is just a matter of undocking at one end and redocking at the other end, and all my external peripherals (keyboard, mouse, external monitor, sound, network, power, etc) are all ready to go in one simple step.

As nice as the Apple laptop hardware is (and it's very nice), it was never designed with the idea of port replicators or docking stations in mind. There are ports for external keyboard/mouse (so long as you like USB) and monitor (Mini DisplayPort, requires adapter to anything useful), network, etc, but there's no "port replicator bus" socket which brings all the signals out for use by a port replicator or docking station. Unsurprisingly Apple doesn't sell a port replicator or docking station (and hasn't for their laptops for many years). So you get to plug all the external devices in each time you change location. Apple's suggested solution to this problem appears to be to use wireless everything -- but there's no wireless video solution, and at least some devices need USB so even a wireless keyboard/mouse doesn't avoid that connector, so you're looking at a minimum of three things to plug in (I'm currently plugging in 5, as gigabit ethernet is much faster than than even 802.11n wireless, and the USB hub in my monitor and keyboard are full -- plus the one extra thing I'm plugging in benefits from being easily disconnectable separately).

There are some third party solutions:

(all found via this MacRumours thread; there's also the Book Arc (US$50 metal stand) designed to hold the MacBook vertically on the desk to save space -- but not solving the cabling problem).

Of those only the BookEndzDock ones look plausibly useful, and even then they're both relatively clunky and don't solve the entire problem (eg, power still needs to be plugged in separately).

At this stage I'll probably just see how often I end up moving my laptop around and how much of a problem it proves to be. But I am a little sad at losing the convenience of the docking station.