In the past few years I have used five brand new MacBooks (all different models and years, work and personal), four monitors, three Thunderbolt docks - everything new and name brand, including $80 name brand cables - and every single combination has crashed and/or required reboots daily, constant power cycling of monitors, etc etc.
When it all works, it's awesome.
But it's unbelievably flaky and annoying, and I can't understand why the bugs haven't been ironed out yet. However, even with a daily reboot it's still more convenient than plugging five cables into my laptop every time I want to dock it.
Edit: I should note that Big Sur is very stable, requiring only weekly-ish reboots.
I should note that Big Sur is very stable, requiring only weekly-ish reboots.
Wow. That's not what I would call "very stable" at all --- unless you mean in the context of using Thunderbolt devices.
- no power
- limited ASPM support, no CPM support
- much larger (36 pins)
additionally, I imagine user experience is worse due to most systems only enumerate at startup and dont handle surprise unplug well at all.
https://pcisig.com/specifications/pciexpress/pcie_cabling1.0...
Proper TB rated cables are far from being thin.
Some 9 years ago, I worked at a place where we had macbooks and Apple Thunderbolt displays. I don't remember ever having issues. And I personally had two displays daisy-chained, with random USB and FireWire peripherals hanging off them. One of the screens or the computer itself developed a contact issue many years later, which of course isn't great, but the connection itself has always been rock-solid.
I remember at one point, after the High Sierra upgrade I think, but I'm not 100% sure on the date, I had some issues with the same thunderbolt screen and the same MBP. But by that time, they had already changed the font rendering, so I didn't use that display as often. Also, the GPU drivers at the time were terribly broken and the MBP would lag like crazy when using it. A few upgrades later, it was solved.
However, in PC land, I have an HP desktop with an HP thunderbolt / usb-c card, and it's hit-and-miss. My understanding is it has something to do with waking up the controller or something, but I've never managed to get it working 100% reliably. DisplayPort alternate mode is broken on Windows, too. I have a friend with a Dell XPS with integrated Thunderbolt, and he gets the exact same behaviour. At least his DP output works...
One of the worst docks I've used was the Dell ones. With those I've had. 50/50 chance the Ethernet will work. And if you do connect expect to drop out.
We are coming close to 2022, we need to set the bar a lot higher than that.
No wonder why people often find me rantish or overly critical. Somethings are just not good enough.
I’m sure it would’ve been running longer had I not needed to reboot to finish installing an app.
I remember having a gaming machine in ~2009 running Windows 7, and outside of me screwing with it (overclocking, etc) it's been rock-solid despite being heavily used; I can't actually recall a bluescreen or crash that I couldn't blame on my own doing.
In contrast, 11 years later, my M1 Macbook despite getting nowhere near the abuse that gaming machine got (it only really runs a web browser and I definitely don't mess with hardware or low-level settings - I don't even have System Integrity Protection disabled) will randomly crash or sometimes fail to wake up and will require a forced shutdown every couple weeks.
When I tried to power the JEYI Thunderdock Mini (this is an almost unknown gem but I love it to pieces because of the price, the size, the M.2 slot, the USB C power input) with the Baseus Galio 120W then it kept connecting and disconnecting without stop, it made the laptop into a chiming instrument :) Once I plugged the Aukey Omnia 100W (PA-B5) it has become rock solid.
I have a Monoprice Thunderbolt 3 Dual DisplayPort Mini Dock (search ebay for thunderbolt 3 dual mini dock you will find it for 30-ish, by far the cheapest TB3 dock) and I have two powered USB hubs chained off it. I need to plug it 2-3 times before the hubs are working but once they do, I never have a problem.
Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Extreme Gen 4 is the host.
On the other hand, I have used continuously during the last 5 years Thunderbolt SSDs from several brands as my boot and working drives (i.e. without using any internal storage), with many computers, mainly Dell laptops and Intel NUCs.
Besides obviously being faster, the Thunderbolt 3 SSDs have been far more reliable than the external SSDs using USB.
So there is at least something that works properly, but I do not know if that is also true on MacBooks, because I have always used Thunderbolt only in Linux.
I agree that there's something magical about getting USB, display, and power over a standard cable.
While I understand the ‘elegance’ factor of the nice and compact USB C ports and the expandability of Thunderbolt, I’m glad that I don’t have changing needs because it would frustrate me to constantly have to look into everything and potentially keep having to buy stuff from other countries just to be able to make use of these ports.
But tldr; my TB3 to DisplayPort adapters work well enough that I only reboot the computer for updates.
Connect each display with a dedicated cable, thunderbolt to HDMI. Works better.
The only issue then is with Macbooks only having 1 or 2 ports, not much you can plug. Use a bluetooth mouse/keyboard to save ports.
as for docks, i’ve tried them all and they all have unacceptable issues of one sort or another.
It was infuriating how many things plug in properly but don’t actually convey the capabilities I wanted. Even picking the wrong DisplayPort cable will limit it at 30hz.
I understand there are explanations that are perfectly cromulent to engineers. But they aren’t any good to the other 99% of users.
Because nobody in China uses DP
It works well for 4k@60Hz and it's one of the cheaper solution at ~ 20$ per cable.
Cherry on top, it's sold by AnkerDirect on Amazon, which is the genuine manufacturer.
UK https://www.amazon.co.uk/Anker-Adapter-MacBook-Thunderbolt-C...
US https://www.amazon.com/Anker-Adapter-MacBook-Thunderbolt-Com...
I have a monitor that's 4K/60 if I directly cable to it, but often only comes up at 30Hz (or 4:2:2 colour mode 60Hz) if I use a KVM. Yes, the KVMs were sold as "4k/60 support" and I've tried two different ones (one HDMI, one DP). One machine works fine, because it's a sucky pre-Cambrian laptop dock that isn't even TRYING for 4K, and the failing one is a desktop with a GTX1080.
What's interesting is that it seems like it only happens in Windows. I experimented with a FreeBSD install, and the drivers there reliably hit 4K/60 even with the DisplayPort KVM in the way.
I suspect the drivers must have different strategies to probe the capabilities of the device and cables, and the Windows drivers interpret them more conservatively.
So I ended up using the KVM as a $100+ USB switch and just toggling the inputs with the monitor's own buttons. (I gather there's software that could do automatic input switching via DCC configuration channels, but one machine is corporate-managed so I can't just stuff random software on it)
Most of them, while otherwise being perfect, also tend to lack some essential feature.
Here’s the cheapest full featured USB-C dongle/dock on german Amazon (a few months ago): https://www.amazon.de/Multiport-MacBook-Adapter-Dockteck-Mic...
Goes well with this extension: https://www.amazon.de/gp/aw/d/B08MXL8JGF
Conclusion: A minimal USB-C docking setup costs 45€. Quite a bit for something essential on some laptops.
"See, it's like you made a pizza with cake flour. It won't taste good, it won't cook quite right, and you'll be disappointed even though it kind of works. There's nothing bad about cake flour, and it works really well for what it's intended for, but it can't be used for everything."
"Imagine you were using bad steel when you were forging a blade. It'll crack, roll or worse, but it'll still look vaguely knife-like."
"It's like you're wanting to play electric rock music but you're missing a few strings and you don't have a pickup so it's really pretty much just a weirdly-shaped banjo."
Until finally I noticed the 'security' thing and set it to none, and could set its brightness to a lower setting and my eyes said thank you.
This mostly works, but it's pretty terrible. If the display goes to sleep (say after a period of inactivity) it's impossible to wake up. Also, if I plug it in while the computer is running, the image won't come on.
Do you have any of these issues, and if no, did you do anything specific to address them?
So much of getting this stuff to work feels like random luck and incantation. I really appreciate the author’s research and effort in writing this up.
From what I can see, eGPU configurations are specifically called out as unsupported, and people trying have a few hurdles to jump as well.
I'm really enjoying not having to reboot my PC every time I change the configuration on my PCIe enabled FPGA dev boards.
