461–470 of 530 posts
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/
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As has often been said, that dock really is a computer. I don't think that's a good thing though. No adapter/hub should be this complex IMO. I don't know how the ubiquity of USB got us to this point, it seems worse than before.
Because it's not USB it's Thunderbolt. Thunderbolt taps directly into the PCIe bus where USB doesn't. It only makes sense it is going to be much more than just a USB switch/hub. It's basically one of those PCIe expansion chasis that allowed extra expansion cards when your case only had 3 slots. Except, this is a nice neat little box on top of your desk.
> Engineers: "Okay... but it's going to be expensive and complicated..."
> Apple: "Money is insignificant next to the power of user experience."
> Intel: "Oh, people are actually using this thing we created?"
> USB-IF: "But us, b..."
> Intel: "So the USB won't let me B. Or let my TB be USB, so let me C."
> USB-IF: "You are again our hearts' delight."
> Customers: "Why is this so complicated? Remember when one connector meant one kind of cable? Those were great days."
And that's how we got here.
My main pain point with USB-C is all the confusion and missing specs. Often, advertising uses Thunderbolt and USB-C interchangeably. It is not. Don’t label my USB-C + DisplayPort hub “Thunderbolt” when it isn’t. And then there’s the specs. Which DisplayPort version does my laptop support? The answer may surprise you. I have experience with Dell laptops. Rather recent devices still only support DP 1.2 over USB-C. How…
Worse is that, to a search engine, every USB product is exactly the same. Search engines take very specific queries and overgeneralize them to the point of uselessness. In the case of USB cables, basically every conductor fits--yes, even the god damned Romex. Some hyperbole sure, but it's hard to find a cable that can do more than charge a phone. "Smart" search engine "AI" has "learned" that SuperSpeed = USB = Wire = Romex. Auh god it's hard to put down the bitter sarcasm.
Having to click hundreds of product pages to look for specifics that a search engine stripped away is hell. It's not even like it's limited to USB. Try finding memory... surprise! Just like everything is a USB.... everything is a DDR. ECC, the very specific thing you need, is DDR. It literally doesn't matter if you put ECC in your query. Because DDR = DDR.
Specs don't help sell the product because search engines will take all of that spec sheet and decide it's exactly "USB."
And don't get me started on bad product pages that claim to sell "SuperSpeed 480 Mbit/s charging cables" Yup, Optimized. What does a search engine learn about that product page? Some people buy it therefore: relevance +9999. "I was tricked" never makes it back to the engine. You can't even flag a product page as inaccurate anymore.
I'm so exhausted that I don't want to buy anything anymore. Search engines were better when they gave you two results for some queries. At least then you knew that the engine wasn't capable of servicing the query in a useful way. You used to be able to hone your "search skill." No longer. You don't need to because now we have learning machines that... can't tell the difference between "gave up in futility" and "found what I was looking for."
What a spectacular failure search is today.
/rant
This same topic drives me mad too. I got a USB-C Satechi hub, for some inexplicable reason, the webcam didn't work and other devices were super flaky. Maybe faulty unit? I returned it anyway. I got another USB-C hub with HDMI and it didn't really work well with my monitor -- it turns out my monitor is 3440x1440, but has an HDMI port which does not support that resolution at 60Hz, so the HDMI is unusable. Oh well, not…
>> I got another USB-C hub... I buy computers with the ports I need. No need for a hub at all. Even my MBA (from 2015) has an SD slot and regular USB ports. This USB-C only thing Apply tried was a big mistake.
Having USB-A ports would make no difference here, I want to deal with LESS cables, not DIFFERENT ones.
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 had two of them with 3 Sabrent Thunderbolt SSDs each. So when you setup a RAID level and then copy data from A to B, it did crash for me each time. For copy I used "Carbon Copy Cloner"
In fact I go so far to say Thunderbolt is not reliable at all for 24/7 use, as it gets much hotter and currently would require active cooling to prevent throttling.
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> It is almost impossible to avoid it. I am doing these Type-C hubs, and other small stuff peripherals for a living. My suggestion, don't look stuff retail, and don't look big brands, even Dell. Pretty much any "brand business" had zero RnD. Their only feedback channel is the RMA rate. If it gets too bad, they just change the supplier. Instead, I really suggest going the other way. Smaller makers have no money for bi…
Can you please suggest some examples for brand business, and small makers? I'd like to compare them for contrast bit I don't know where to start. Particularly I don't seem to be able to distinguish rebranded whitelabels and actual small makers.
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Apparently you just missed me saying my CalDigit TS3+ failed last week and IT had a whole bin full of others that failed. It's not the cables.. they handed me a new TS3+ and it immediately worked perfectly and it will probably continue to work for a year or two before starting the process of flaking out. To be honest with the # of them I've seen break (almost everyone I know at work) the posts here seem like astro-tu…
> Apparently you just missed me saying my CalDigit TS3+ failed last week and IT had a whole bin full of others that failed. Nope, that's why I posted a counter-anecdote. Not one has failed in my circle of friends, I think they're ugly but the build quality seems pretty great, so I'm just surprised to hear about your IT department's bin of dead TS3+ that they keep around for some reason. (I can't speak for the OWC doc…
Sure a corporate anecdote is an anecdote but it's a sample size of ~500 versus 1 or 2-3.
The OWC ones do seem to be worse, that's why we transitioned to the TS3+.
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I’m with you on this. I’m a FAANG software engineer who does hardware stuff too and I have a 2020 MacBook Air with 2 (two!) USB-C ports. One for charging, one for other stuff. In my two years of owning the device I have not once ever been frustrated needing the third port. I do quite often use both of the two ports, but even needing three seems to never happen in my use case. I don’t use external monitors with that d…
Im a non-FAANG developer so i cant comment on what all the sheep/ad devs are doing; but I can comment on what a polygot cross-platform cross-cloud software engineer who supports a plethora of native portable devices integrations require, and thats USB hubs with ports coming out the ye-ha - otherwise im constantly playing musical chairs.
But why did you have to begin your comment with the condescending “all the sheep/ad devs”? It makes you look insecure and I only read beyond that because your comment was so brief.
There are machines with lots of ports and machines with few and someone’s choice of which to use is not a moral judgement.
It also has issues with sleep and device swapping for random devices not to wake up or a „stalled“ Ethernet Port when doing Teams meetings.
Updating the firmware didn’t help.