At the moment I'm considering the Dell UltraSharp 32 4K USB-C Hub Monitor - U3223QE. I know it is only a USB-C hub, but I'd like to be able to plug my older laptops into it on occasion, so I need something with a least an HDMI input and preferably also a DisplayPort input.
I don't know anything about monitor-hubs so if people have comments or recommendations, please let me know.
Also, many monitor docks power off the USB ports when they go to sleep, and then you can't use a device on those ports (including a keyboard or mouse) to wake up the computer.
Most new monitors will however allow you to switch to USB3.0 speeds at the cost of being capped at 4K@30Hz.
If you want to use a webcam and a usb Jabra speakerphone for video calls you may exceed the power limits.
Took me way too long to diagnose the issue
It acts as both a USB hub and a KVM switch. I plug my MBP in with USB-C, and also attach a Linux desktop via DisplayPort and a separate USB3 cable. When I switch the display between the Mac and desktop, my keyboard and mouse also switch because they're connected to the monitor.
As others have said, using USB C for display leaves only USB2 speeds for other devices attached to the monitor. This is fine for keyboard + mouse but I wouldn't attach an SSD to the monitor's USB ports.
Other nice qualities include connectivity options (USB-C, HDMI, DisplayPort), a very beefy 90 watts power delivery, slim bezels, and highly adjustable height/tilt/rotation. Downsides are no speakers and 60 Hz refresh rate. But I haven't found anything better than this display.
If you just need the one monitor, Dell has some great options. I can just have the one cable to my laptop, everything else is wired to the monitor and works great.
So the Dell monitor is connected to 3 computers now, it switches sound depending on the video source (!) : USBC, DisplayPort and HDMI all pass sound to my headphones. And Ethernet stays with USBC box - exactly what I wanted. I still need a keyboard/mouse switch but overall “Display as a dock” setup turned out very good for me.
I Googled "Mac EDID ruby"[0] to try to find the script that I'd found and used.
I am using a 350-nit Philips Brilliance 329P9H (manufactured by AOC), and, frankly, the size makes a huge difference contra the need for multiple panels. It works well with Windows and macOS devices.
One does not need Thunderbolt on a device like this; anything latency-sensitive or bandwidth-intensive should be connected directly as is. USB-C is fine.
Sure, I think some of the latest USB standards should be able to support that while at the same time providing 4K@60Hz. But I'd also like the monitor to support higher resolutions, too.
The monitors with USB-C charging that I've seen (eg X34GS) have really bad coil whine if you use them for charging... which is sort of like the main point here. and beyond that, it's only 89W, what happens if you want a 140W charger? what happens if you want 10gbe and the monitor doesn't have that? what happens if the thunderbolt part of the monitor is poorly implemented or has problems? thunderbolt is known for being finicky and do you want to trust monitor companies to get it right, when they can't even make a monitor that doesn't coil whine while charging?
and on the flip side... what if you want to upgrade your monitor, or it fails/breaks? or what if you want to upgrade to something better? the monitors with a good dock implementation won't necessarily be exactly what you want, and it certainly will be expensive compared to picking a dock+monitor separately.
it's very attractive in a sterile product-designer sense to have the dock built into the monitor, but dock+monitor is nearly as clean and gives you a LOT more flexibility and reliability in a practical sense. If anything I'd go the other direction and have the monitor powered off a usb-c from the dock lol.
as far as general cleanliness, one of these years I'm gonna cut a hole in my wall and drop some cables to the basement with TB3 or DP 1.4 active fiber cables (not electrical cable so fire code ignores it) and use a TB4 dock as a header for my desktop in the basement, so it will be super clean. You can even run power cables in the walls (technically you probably need this to be speaker wire to get CL2 fire rating) and eliminate all cables except for a couple running to the dock/monitor through the walls. Get a monitor arm for your desk and you can lift everything up and clean it all, etc. Would be super nice, I'm tired of cables everywhere and my desktop dumping heat in my office.
(don't do wallmount arms though... tried that and didn't have very good results because the monitor arm really works best going straight forward and doesn't give you a lot of motion laterally. With a desk-mount arm you can put it where it needs to be, with a wall arm you have to put it on a stud and you can't really move it laterally very much, so if the stud isn't exactly where you want it, you almost have to move the desk to fit the mount, didn't work well.)
The former seems more and more common among monitors, so it should be easier to find the kind of monitor you want.
But it's also true that it's probable for your connectivity needs to change before you want to change the monitor.
You can connect the monitors with a display port cable, then use a single USB-C cable to connect both to the laptop in one go. The dock also works great for everything I've needed it for. (dock only works on one monitor when daisy-chaining them, but that's no big deal and appears to be a fundamental limitation of using display port to daisy-chain.)