Not strictly related but I just bought a USB4 USB-C cable which is rated at 40 Gbps. I still can't really believe it. (I still remember saving to cassette tape)
I use one of these for two 4k monitors, sound, ethernet, mouse, webcam, AND charging. It's amazing having one cable to plug in when I work from my desk. Unfortunately requires one of those $400 docks though.
I just bought a monitor arm that has a USB dock at the base. The dock is actually just a USB extension cord that is enclosed by the base of the arm. Think of it like putting a $10 USB hub into a box and poking holes in it to stick wires through. Great teardown, makes you wonder what's truly inside these boxes.
In other news, I do think desk makers should start incorporating the USB dock inside the top board of a desk. People go through a lot of money and bullshit to keep their setup clean, especially those who swap computers.
> In other news, I do think desk makers should start incorporating the USB dock inside the top board of a desk. People go through a lot of money and bullshit to keep their setup clean, especially those who swap computers
recently went through the process of picking a new hub and it took hours to locate one actually appropriate to my use case. Helpfully enough, chatgpt/claude were both good at locating ones with specific needs (x USB-C ports, y USB-A, no HDMI, no SD card readers), would probably have taken a lot longer without.
Back at one of my previous employers we had a long internal briefing about why our latest device did not have USB-C when other solutions on the market by then had.
The connector is solid but my god have there been disasters because of USB-C.
1. Power distribution upto high wattage, not always with auto sensing,
2. Wites rated to different data transmission speeds.
3. USB standard data transfers and Thunderbolt over the same connector and wire but most accessories are not rated for Thunderbolt.
Can anyone tell me why I have several devices in my home that demand a certain USB-C cord in order to charge? They are mostly cheap Chinese devices that won’t acknowledge a more expensive (e.g., Apple) uSB-C cord plugged into them. Even when plugged into the same transformer. They only charge with the cheap USB-C cord they came with. What gives?
I've been on a Macbook M1 Air for the last few years and wanted multiple screens, so I got a USB 3 hub (Dell D6000) which does DisplayLink. I had almost everything hooked in there, but still connected one screen direct via usb-c. Displaylink is good for an M1 as you can add loads of screens if you want, but you can't watch streaming services on them as MacOs thinks your screen is being 'watched'.
I did want a thunderbolt hub but as far as I could tell at the time Thunderbolt and Displaylink just didn't come in the same package, so I was stuck with two cables.
Three years on, I picked up an M4 machine that can do two external screens natively, great, I can reach my goal of only plugging one cable into my macbook. But the Dell can't do that on a Mac because of something or other meaning it would work as mirrored-only.
Time to grab an actual thunderbolt dock. I picked up an HP TB3 refurb (HP P5Q58AA) which was cheap (30 AUD) and seemed great on paper, only to find it needed a type of power adaptor I didn't have that put me back another 60 bucks, and when I got it all hooked up it didn't always work and couldn't support decent refresh rates on my monitors, with one always being stuck at 30Hz. There was a software update available, but for that you need a windows machine with a TB3 port, not something I have.
So then I grabbed a Kensington SD5750T, which was another 140 bucks, but I am pleased to report that it just works and supports dual 4k60 over thunderbolt/USB-C. There is no HDMI or Displayport on this thing, but my monitors both have USB-C in so... Unfortunately, now that I've read the article, I can also confirm it contains a Realtek 0x8153, and is an OEM'd 'goodway' dock.
However, I can’t help but feel a little bit cheated by companies just buying off-the-shelf products, slightly modifying the case layout, and then quadruple the price because it’s “from a reputable company”.
LOL. Welcome to the world of OEM/ODM. As a conservative estimate I'd guess >95% of all consumer electronics is done this way. Even the big names like Apple, Dell, Lenovo, etc. do it.
However, if you are - according to Wikipedia - a two-billion-dollar company like Realtek, then I expect you to get your shit together. There are exactly zero excuses for Realtek to not have a driver release ready almost a year after Big Sur has been announced. Zero.
Mac users are in the minority. It's worth noting that the RTL8153 is a native RNDIS device, which has its history on the Windows side, and Realtek has only started contributing drivers to Linux relatively recently.
FWIW I've had great luck with Realtek NICs, although I don't specifically recall using their USB NICs.
Looks like he only bought cheaper things, so no wonder they all eventually died. My USB-C hub is an HP Thunderbolt dock. It's beefy as heck, lasted for years with no issues. It has a tiny fan inside, which I assume helps with the longevity. I hear good things about CalDigit docks too. Those also are very expensive.
Unfortunately I can't say I'm surprised that the common thread was Realtek network chips. I've found their NICs to be fairly flaky over the years - the majority work, but a solid minority don't. In contrast, Intel NICs have been bulletproof for me and I seek them out whenever I have any choice in the matter.
Years ago, I bought a hub similar to that Satechi one. It worked great until I unplugged my laptop. Then my home network would die. After some sleuthing, I realized the RJ45 interface repeated any packets received, creating a network loop and confusing my Ethernet switch. I contacted Satechi about this obvious defect. Their support team insisted this was by design and told me to unplug USB-C power from the hub whenever I disconnected my laptop, which … kinda defeats the point?
Man that is a lot of computer to put into that product for as little money as possible.
I'm not intending to excuse the products with likely bad firmware causing most of these issues, especially Ethernet PHYs. Though, in my professional experience doing embedded device firmware, Ethernet PHYs are always the biggest pain, hands down. The firmware included with them has many many ways to configure it wrong, and the defaults are typically just random settings, not a reasonable configuration. Just getting the drivers even running sometimes involves just knowing a few tricks.
Anyways, it doesn't surprise me many have trouble working right, especially when they indicate they are all running OEM firmware essentially.
USB-PD hubs are very annoying. Devices with no battery on a hub (Raspberry Pi etc) will just get hard rebooted if anything else gets plugged into the same hub. I looked at a lot of hubs and they all behaved this way. They all cut power to everything, then re-negotiate the power allowance each device gets from the shared wattage, every time anything new connects. I could not find a hub that honored existing power contracts and gave new devices the remainder. My guess is the average customer expect the newest plugged in device to get max power (at the expense of everything else) or they return it to the store thinking it's broken.
I slowly replaced my home network piece by piece trying to find the bottleneck that was causing my gigabit internet to top out at ~300kbps in my office on the other side of the house from the modem.
After replacing the Ethernet cable run from the second floor to the basement with fiber optic... And the switches in between... And seeing no improvement... I tried a different computer with a built-in ethernet port on the same cable, and pulled 920kbps.
The problem... Was my Caldigit Thunderbolt Dock. I replaced it with an OWC one from Facebook marketplace for cheap and it solved the problem... Roughly $500 in. I'm still angry I didn't check that early earlier.
I’m so glad to hear other people have had issues with these stupid cheap docks. I’ve burned through three of them over the last few years. It seems that not routing laptop charging power helps, but doesn’t solve the issue. Stupid cheap products.
I'm convinced the only way to get a quality piece of hardware is to spend a couple hundred bucks on a Thunderbolt 4 or 5 hub. I got a TB4 hub from CalDigit and it works great. And no misbehaving network chip to be found either.
I’ve also given up on USB hubs and I’m using a Thunderbolt 4 dock to get more IO out of my Mac Studio. It feels crazy to spend that much $’s, but it solved my problems.
More accurate to say it’s a dock than a hub, but I’m using a Dell 2427DEB monitor[0] with my Dell work notebook and a second monitor daisy chained from it on the DP out port.
My work laptop has just a single USB-C cable plugged into the monitor for everything making it super trivial to plug it back in when I use it away from my desk (which I do regularly).
My personal desktop has a single DP and also a USB A to B cable. The monitor has KVM capability so I can super conveniently switch between them even with the two screens.
Cables are completely minimized with this set up, I’m very happy.
The only thing that’s unfortunate is that I occasionally work on a MacBook Pro 16” M4 and it can’t drive the second monitor over the same USB-C cable as Apple CBA to have support for DP MST on even their premium priced hardware. So I have to also plug in an HDMI cable to the second monitor.
Also unfortunate with the MacBook Pro is that macOS UI scaling doesn’t allow ratios like 125% meaning the UI elements aren’t quite at my preferred size. My Windows 11 handles this perfectly.
They do this for MBP market segmentation now, but really, this started with the ProDisplay XDR.
At the time, people wondered about how they were able to drive the 6K 10 bit display, as the math didn't fit the spec.
People like me found out. Because they completely fucked with DP1.4 specs to make it happen with Big Sur.
In Catalina, my Intel Mac Pro happily drove 2 4K HDR monitors at 144 Hz. Upgrade to Big Sur, not any more. 95Hz for 4K SDR, 60Hz for 4K HDR. Not the cables, not the monitors. Indeed, "downgrading" the monitors advertised support to DP 1.2 gave better options, 120Hz SDR, 75Hz HDR.
Hundreds of reports, different card/cable/monitor combos.
Was at least still the case as of Ventura, which makes sense, because it wasn't a bug, it was just an Apple style fuck you to anyone not fully invested in "all Apple, all the time".
One of the things that I found most frustrating about USB-C hubs is how hard it is to find one that actually gives you multiple USB-C ports. I have several USB-C devices but most hubs just give you one USB-C port and a bunch of USB-A ports. At most it’s 2 USB-C ports but only with the hub that plugs into both USB-C ports on my MacBook Pro (so I’m never able to get more ports than I started with). The result is I end up having to keep swapping devices. For a connector that was supposed to be the "one universal port," it's weird that most hubs assume you only need one USB-C connection. Has anyone found a decent hub with multiple USB-C data outputs?
I 'member hearing stories about an early USB C hub which contained a network chip that, when no computer was attached but it had power from the brick, would randomly barf invalid ARP packets, up to and including taking entire networks down. Anyone 'member details?
37 comments
[ 9.4 ms ] story [ 58.2 ms ] threadIn other news, I do think desk makers should start incorporating the USB dock inside the top board of a desk. People go through a lot of money and bullshit to keep their setup clean, especially those who swap computers.
Will be obsolete in 5 years every time
The connector is solid but my god have there been disasters because of USB-C.
1. Power distribution upto high wattage, not always with auto sensing, 2. Wites rated to different data transmission speeds. 3. USB standard data transfers and Thunderbolt over the same connector and wire but most accessories are not rated for Thunderbolt.
Omg I love it and I hate it.
....like?
USB-C hubs and my slow descent into madness (2021) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30911598 - April 2022 (513 comments)
The main gist was that almost every hub used the same board.
Is it a charge only cable (no data)? Is it usb3 5gbps ? Is it 100 watt power delivery? Is it thunderbolt 3/4/5?
I've been on a Macbook M1 Air for the last few years and wanted multiple screens, so I got a USB 3 hub (Dell D6000) which does DisplayLink. I had almost everything hooked in there, but still connected one screen direct via usb-c. Displaylink is good for an M1 as you can add loads of screens if you want, but you can't watch streaming services on them as MacOs thinks your screen is being 'watched'.
I did want a thunderbolt hub but as far as I could tell at the time Thunderbolt and Displaylink just didn't come in the same package, so I was stuck with two cables.
Three years on, I picked up an M4 machine that can do two external screens natively, great, I can reach my goal of only plugging one cable into my macbook. But the Dell can't do that on a Mac because of something or other meaning it would work as mirrored-only.
Time to grab an actual thunderbolt dock. I picked up an HP TB3 refurb (HP P5Q58AA) which was cheap (30 AUD) and seemed great on paper, only to find it needed a type of power adaptor I didn't have that put me back another 60 bucks, and when I got it all hooked up it didn't always work and couldn't support decent refresh rates on my monitors, with one always being stuck at 30Hz. There was a software update available, but for that you need a windows machine with a TB3 port, not something I have.
So then I grabbed a Kensington SD5750T, which was another 140 bucks, but I am pleased to report that it just works and supports dual 4k60 over thunderbolt/USB-C. There is no HDMI or Displayport on this thing, but my monitors both have USB-C in so... Unfortunately, now that I've read the article, I can also confirm it contains a Realtek 0x8153, and is an OEM'd 'goodway' dock.
Just as well I'm happy with wireless networking!
LOL. Welcome to the world of OEM/ODM. As a conservative estimate I'd guess >95% of all consumer electronics is done this way. Even the big names like Apple, Dell, Lenovo, etc. do it.
However, if you are - according to Wikipedia - a two-billion-dollar company like Realtek, then I expect you to get your shit together. There are exactly zero excuses for Realtek to not have a driver release ready almost a year after Big Sur has been announced. Zero.
Mac users are in the minority. It's worth noting that the RTL8153 is a native RNDIS device, which has its history on the Windows side, and Realtek has only started contributing drivers to Linux relatively recently.
FWIW I've had great luck with Realtek NICs, although I don't specifically recall using their USB NICs.
I slowly replaced my home network piece by piece trying to find the bottleneck that was causing my gigabit internet to top out at ~300kbps in my office on the other side of the house from the modem.
After replacing the Ethernet cable run from the second floor to the basement with fiber optic... And the switches in between... And seeing no improvement... I tried a different computer with a built-in ethernet port on the same cable, and pulled 920kbps.
The problem... Was my Caldigit Thunderbolt Dock. I replaced it with an OWC one from Facebook marketplace for cheap and it solved the problem... Roughly $500 in. I'm still angry I didn't check that early earlier.
My network is 10 gigabit now though.
(although.... looks like it's a realtek with the r8169 driver)
My work laptop has just a single USB-C cable plugged into the monitor for everything making it super trivial to plug it back in when I use it away from my desk (which I do regularly).
My personal desktop has a single DP and also a USB A to B cable. The monitor has KVM capability so I can super conveniently switch between them even with the two screens.
Cables are completely minimized with this set up, I’m very happy.
The only thing that’s unfortunate is that I occasionally work on a MacBook Pro 16” M4 and it can’t drive the second monitor over the same USB-C cable as Apple CBA to have support for DP MST on even their premium priced hardware. So I have to also plug in an HDMI cable to the second monitor.
Also unfortunate with the MacBook Pro is that macOS UI scaling doesn’t allow ratios like 125% meaning the UI elements aren’t quite at my preferred size. My Windows 11 handles this perfectly.
[0] https://www.dell.com/en-us/shop/dell-pro-27-plus-video-confe...
They do this for MBP market segmentation now, but really, this started with the ProDisplay XDR.
At the time, people wondered about how they were able to drive the 6K 10 bit display, as the math didn't fit the spec.
People like me found out. Because they completely fucked with DP1.4 specs to make it happen with Big Sur.
In Catalina, my Intel Mac Pro happily drove 2 4K HDR monitors at 144 Hz. Upgrade to Big Sur, not any more. 95Hz for 4K SDR, 60Hz for 4K HDR. Not the cables, not the monitors. Indeed, "downgrading" the monitors advertised support to DP 1.2 gave better options, 120Hz SDR, 75Hz HDR.
Hundreds of reports, different card/cable/monitor combos.
Was at least still the case as of Ventura, which makes sense, because it wasn't a bug, it was just an Apple style fuck you to anyone not fully invested in "all Apple, all the time".
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25437219
And the cheapest way to measure bit error rates?