USB-C Hubs and My Slow Descent Into Madness
Dennis Schubert (2021, via Hacker News):
I have one of those laptops lacking a lot of accessory ports. In fact, I’m writing this on an Apple MacBook Pro, and all I got was four lousy USB-C ports. If I want to connect pretty much anything, I need some sort of adapter or some sort of hub. USB-C hubs are a great idea: not only do they usually offer a power supply pass-through, but they also allow you to plug in some USB devices, an ethernet cable, and maybe even a monitor. Some even have fancy stuff like an SD card reader or a secondary audio output! And all of that over a single USB-C connection, which makes everything super comfortable if you frequently carry your laptop around your home, but you also have a desk with fixed devices set up.
Unfortunately, since 2018, I’ve worked through three USB-C hubs, and they’re all kinda bad.
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It honestly feels like no matter what you buy, you get more or less the same hardware, and you’re most likely getting a heavily overpriced product just because some company printed their logo on it.
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The fact that most USB-C hubs tend to use the same RTL8153 networking stack is also very annoying, especially since this is known to break on macOS, and it looks like Realtek just doesn’t care. That’s not really great if you’re promoting your hub primarily to MacBook owners.
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’m using an Anker hub with a bunch of USB-A ports, and it’s one of the more reliable ones I’ve owned—certainly better than the Studio Display—but I do have the sense that it’s slowing things down compared with when I connect drives directly to my MacBook Pro. I’m also using an Anker Thunderbolt dock, which is pretty good but doesn’t have enough ports. I still wish for more built into the Mac itself. (Recent MacBook Pros are down from 4 ports to 3.)
Previously:
- macOS Tahoe Drops FireWire Support
- MacBook Pro 2024
- Belkin Connect USB-C Hub
- QGeeM and Hyper Thunderbolt 4 Hubs
- USB-C Hubs Breaking Ethernet Networks
- OWC miniStack STX
- Thunderbolt 4 Docks
- USB-C Is Still a Mess
- The Impossible Dream of USB-C
- Arc Hub USB-C Adapter
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I've been using the OWC 11-Port Thunderbolt Dock without too many problems. The only real problem I've had is that my MacBook always asks to confirm the connection to the accessory when first connected, and sometimes I forget to accept in that dialog and then I wonder where my connected drives are.
Yeah, my MacBook Pro keeps forgetting that my Thunderbolt dock is allowed. So, when I plug it in in clamshell mode, sometimes I just get a blank screen because there’s nowhere to show the Allow dialog. So I open it up to see the dialog, and then all my windows get messed up as it tries to fit them onto the small internal display. I think there’s basically zero chance that this accessory confirmation step is ever going to help me, but it causes problems regularly.
