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Comment by clem | Hacker News Reader

Ironic you mention the Switch given that, within that plastic cradle, it's still a USB-C dock.

Hey, if someone made a USB-C dock for laptops that felt as good as a Switch or a Thinkpad Dock I'd be half-invested from the jump. Unfortunately, the majority of the docks I've seen are more along the lines of a tumor-sized dongle that you strap your laptop to.

Go take a look at the Dell TB16 : it's a quite massive thing, almost the size of an old macmini 2009, equiped with a too short of a tb cable. And fun fact, the TB16 is also fan cooled with an Embedded Controller (EC) and firmware that manage the fan curb.

Literally just returned a Dell WD19TB. Supposedly it was certified to work with MacBook Pro and tested with a 16in 2020 Intel and 2021 MacBook Pro Max. Neither worked and dock would shutdown after only 5 minutes if I was lucky.

For Macs I would only use the suggested docs from Apple (CalDigit/OWC etc).

CalDigit Element hub is exceptional.

Could not ever get the up-to-date TB16 to do power delivery correctly to anything (HP Zbook/various Asus/Lenovo Yoga 7) except a Dell laptop. The led on the USB-C connector stays off. The power - if delivered - stays very low and the laptop takes from its battery.

I have a Dell WD19TB too and it works great with the MacBook Pro M1 Pro. I have 2 monitors connected (a 1440p@240Hz and a 1080p@60Hz), keyboard, mouse, a Elgato video capture card and ethernet. The 1080p monitor gave some trouble though, I had to connect it to the usb-c port on the dock that supports daisy chaining.

The dock also works out of the box with the iPad Pro M1 (with some caveats, only the 1440p monitor outputs video, didn't try to use the Elgato card) and with my Dell Latitude running Ubuntu.

https://www.brydge.com/products/macbook-vertical-dock

The Brydge ones look nice, but I prefer having my laptop's screen fully accessible while docked. Plus, I'm not really sure how I liked the idea of a vertically positioned dock... one bad swipe and I'd be out my Macbook, because I can guarantee you it's not surviving the fall off my desk.

And only two ports? What's the point of even docking it in the first place if I get less IO out of it?

well you don't get "less" IO, you get exactly the same. Also you said "like the Switch," so that means screen-inaccessible and vertically positioned.

Now it sounds like what you really want is what I use: a single cord connected to an LG Ultrafine that has it's own set of built-in ports, one of which is connected to a port replicator (legacy USB-A, ethernet, etc).

Sorry, I should have been more specific. The Lenovo Thinkpad dock is like the Switch dock but better, since it doesn't render certain features of the device unusable when docked.

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