A couple weeks ago Woot had this item for sale:

That’s a 5-port USB hub with an iPod dock built in. Tailor-made to my needs, and only $19.99 shipped! I went for it. It came. It worked. Then it stopped working. It got really, really hot, and it would just … stop. I Googled it and noted that this was a known issue, that there was a bad batch and some of them overheated, but not all, and Belkin would replace it.

So I remembered the “Warranty: Lifetime (Belkin)” line on the Woot sale (ie, this is a new item, not refurb, and Belkin will replace it). I went to Belkin’s support site and filed for an RMA. They gave me an RMA. They gave me a shipping label. Belkin would replace it.

I shipped the defective unit back to Belkin. The shipping ran me twelve bucks, but I was STILL under the street price of the unit, so I wasn’t that upset. Belkin would replace it.

Then a Belkin rep wrote me and said the part number on my RMA form was no good. I replied with the part number (again) and a link to their own website showing the product.

The rep replied that they don’t make this unit anymore. Belkin would not replace it.

But I could have something else of the same value. I looked on the website and they no longer make a USB hub with an iPod dock in it. At all. Which is nonsensical. I asked for mine back, figuring I’d just deal with the intermittent failures.

The rep replied that they can’t return mine, but they could send me the new version, which is this:

Now that’s cool and everything, but it’s half the retail price of the dock I had (not that I paid that, but they don’t know that), it has no USB hub in it, and because I’m not in an office with a modular cubicle system, it requires drilling a three-inch hole into my desk. The item page even specifies Belkin does not sell a three-inch saw bit for your drill! Forgive me, but no, I don’t want that.

So I wrote back again, saying no, I don’t want to drill a hole in my desk and that’s not a USB hub, thank you very much, and asked for this instead:

That’s a 7-port USB hub, with two of the ports on top. That’s a cool thing, and I’ve eyed it for a while. But it still means I have to add a dock and a cable to have my iPod on the desk. The whole idea was to remove a cable or three from my life. A USB hub with a built-in iPod dock is brilliant. A plain old USB hub is boring. Also, this is still significantly less than the retail price of the unit I had.

What I’ve decided I really want, and what I’ll be watching like a hawk to see when they update it to work with a Mac (inexplicable that it doesn’t yet), is this:

Look at that. Read about it here. Isn’t it gorgeous? It’s a dock. You connect DVI, sound (even surround! even optical!), USB (only three, but whatever), and ethernet to it, and you connect it to your notebook with an ExpressCard. That is the future. Right now, when I come home with the computer, I connect five cables to it: power, USB, sound, DVI, and FireWire. This thing would cut that five down to three (power, ExpressCard, and FireWire). It’s the first docking system I’ve ever seen that actually made sense with a MacBook Pro (which has ports on both sides and can’t slide into a traditional laptop dock). But, as noted above, not Mac-compatible. Bastards.

So I guess my point is, the word “lifetime” in the phrase “Belkin lifetime warranty” does not mean lifetime. It means lifetime for everything except the iPod hub I had, the iPod hub I want, the iPod hub I wish I’d known they would refuse to replace. The iPod hub they inexplicably stopped making.