USB-C hubs and my slow descent into madness (2021) • Hacker News Board

Re: USB-C hubs and my slow descent into madness (2021)

#151

Post by jmyeet » Mon, Apr 04, 2022, 10:37 PM UTC

j_crick wrote: post #141

jmyeet wrote: post #74

I've gone through a number of Thunderbolt docks over the last few years. I tend to prefer docks to hubs because you tend to use your laptop at several fixed positions, each of which might have 1 or more monitors, a network cable, accessories (eg keyboard, mouse, camera) and so on. It's easier to just plug in one cable from the dock to the Macbook that'll do everything including power it. A good example of this is the…

> All the ports you could possibly want. No HDMI.

True. Personally, I never use HDMI but YMMV. You can of course use a USB-C to HDMI cable however.

Re: USB-C hubs and my slow descent into madness (2021)

#152

Post by NaturalPhallacy » Mon, Apr 04, 2022, 10:39 PM UTC

OMG. That might explain why the piece of shit dongle my work provided managed to bring my entire internet connection down for all the devices on it by downloading multi-gig OS update from Apple at a screaming 1.2MB/s (yes, one point two megabytes per second) over my symmetric gigabit internet connection.

Somehow I couldn't ping google from my windows desktop connected via ethernet, or access the web via my phone or ipad via wifi. The router itself couldn't even ping anything.

The weirdest thing was the update never so much as paused and it wasn't using even 3% of my bandwidth. I'm not network engineer enough to even guess how the fuck it did that.

Once the update was done I just unplugged the Ethernet and used built in wifi cause I needed the HDMI/USB 3 ports on it. Zero problems thereafter. Internet was fine on every device.

It was shaped just like the pieces of shit in this article.

Re: USB-C hubs and my slow descent into madness (2021)

#153

Post by jcelerier » Mon, Apr 04, 2022, 10:39 PM UTC

even without USB-C, I'm under the impression that somewhere in the stack there's an overflow: every single of my USB3 hubs after some time (a few weeks not being turned off) enter into some locked state where they just don't work anymore, on all of my computers

Re: USB-C hubs and my slow descent into madness (2021)

#154

Post by wwalexander » Mon, Apr 04, 2022, 10:41 PM UTC

moritonal wrote: post #7

If you want a decent dock you have to spend a bit of money. I went through this pain before accepting the cost and buying a CalDigit Thunderbolt 4 Element Hub[1]. Run's two 4k displays at 60Hz, any peripheral and charges my laptop. So good I bought a second. 1. https://www.caldigit.com/thunderbolt-4-element-hub/

I’d just like to chime in with the Kensington SD5700T [1]. I’ve tried a CalDigit TS3 Plus, an Anker PowerExpand 13-in-1, and the Kensington has by far been the most reliable.

It doesn’t have built-in HDMI/DisplayPort out, but it’s easy to buy the appropriate cable to connect to your monitor (I recommend Club3D [2]). Especially if you’re trying to use an HDMI 2.1 or DisplayPort 1.4 display, as I’ve found most built-in ports on these hubs don’t support these latest standards or have weird issues with them.

It also has a nice mounting bracket [3] that lets you hide the cable mess under your desk or behind your monitor.

[1] https://www.kensington.com/p/products/device-docking-connect...

[2] https://www.club-3d.com/en/cat/cable/usb_type_c/1606/301/

[3] https://www.kensington.com/p/products/device-docking-connect...

Re: USB-C hubs and my slow descent into madness (2021)

#155

Post by randomblock1 » Mon, Apr 04, 2022, 10:41 PM UTC

> I appear to be paying a lot of money for products that I could buy for cheap on random websites is starting to piss me off a bit at this point.

It seems like if you bought an accessory that's just a PCB (which means excluding headphones, storage, etc) within the last 5 years, there's like a 90% chance of it being dropshipped.

At this point, I've just given up and ordered right from AliExpress. I can't even name any good accessory manufacturers off the top of my head.

Re: USB-C hubs and my slow descent into madness (2021)

#156

Post by austhrow743 » Mon, Apr 04, 2022, 10:41 PM UTC

tristor wrote: post #104

I've been through this rodeo myself. I've been happily using for years docks made by Hyper over USB-C (and now over TB4). When on the go, I use the official Apple dongle for HDMI and USB. If I need more ports, Hyper and Anker both make USB-C hubs that are very solid and actually work. I totally agree with the author, most of the products on the market are garbage, and many are the same garbage with different names. T…

Or if you don’t want to fork out for premium products, at least go straight to aliexpress and pay cheap prices for your cheap products.

Re: USB-C hubs and my slow descent into madness (2021)

#157

Post by JonChesterfield » Mon, Apr 04, 2022, 10:44 PM UTC

Lenovo dock gen 2 here. Running power, three monitors, ethernet, misc low bandwidth usb peripherals. Totally robust on windows and linux, I don't have an osx box at present.

It was not competitively priced and I feel a lot better about that after this post.

Re: USB-C hubs and my slow descent into madness (2021)

#158

Post by kmeisthax » Mon, Apr 04, 2022, 10:45 PM UTC

Oh hey, Realtek networking. That's the thing that made me give up on trying to Hackintosh back in the Snow Leopard days. The weird ported-from-Linux kexts that existed at the time would just give up and kill the network after a few GBs transmitted - not even enough to download contemporary Xcode. Glad to hear even the official experience with these chips is just as bad /s

Re: USB-C hubs and my slow descent into madness (2021)

#159

Post by noobee » Mon, Apr 04, 2022, 10:45 PM UTC

dml2135 wrote: post #82

Does anyone know if it's possible to drive three HD/QHD monitors via a single thunderbolt port on an M1 Mac, and if any docks exist that would support this use case? Many of these docks and Apple support documents say they support dual displays at 4K resolutions, but it's difficult-to-impossible to find information on # of displays supported at lower resolutions.

I am using the USB-C 4K with an M1 Mac Pro (Pro CPU), driving 24k@60Hz (via DP) and 14k@30Hz (via HDMI): https://plugable.com/collections/docking-stations/3x-display...

Re: USB-C hubs and my slow descent into madness (2021)

#160

Post by loudthing » Mon, Apr 04, 2022, 10:47 PM UTC

Evidlo wrote: post #135

Why do people buy laptops that don't have this stuff already on it? I run an engineering course and it's almost comical how often students have to set aside their $2000 Macbooks and use the desktop workstations because they forgot their dongles at home. My Thinkpad has 6 USB ports (2 USB 3.0), SDCard, DisplayPort, VGA, ethernet and also e-sata and Firewire which I've never used.

Honest answer: Apple is a lifestyle brand, however they manage to offer a superior product to the layman because they have tight control over both hardware and software codevelopment. In my experience, people tend to also like Apple hardware because Apple stores are ubiquitous, so when you need a repair done, you just take it to your local mall and get it fixed rather than mailing it away to Lenovo and hoping for the best.

Out of curiosity, in your engineering course, what are students expected to used to their own computers for? In my experience, any engineering course with labs that would require dongles supply desktop computers anyway. Your school doesn't have desktops in the classroom right? What equipment are you interfacing with that would be easily both mac and pc compatible anyway?