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.
Will be obsolete in 5 years every time
Hopefully there will be a matching sized one (60mm) doing something useful, but if not you can just put a normal grommet cover in and do the stuff under the desk.
I'm using these things a bunch.
It’s called GEO and it’s becoming a thing.
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.
I was under the impression that the USB protocol just fell back to 1a 5v when power negotiation was unsure.
What kinds of devices?
The manufacturers cheaped out in not including the right resistors.
And if you spin the new board and it works with the A->C cable sitting on your desk, then what could possibly be different about plugging it into a C<->C cable, right?
The spec was written by a SW engineer, this explains some things. /s
I have 2 powerbanks that cannot be charged by USB-C port when at 0%. The signaling circuitry simply doesn't work. No idea who designed this. It is silly beyond belief. I have to charge it with normal 5V A-to-C cable for 30 seconds, then unplug, then all the PD stuff will start working and I can fastcharge it with USB-C port again. I'm screwed without A-to-C cable.
Out-of-spec USB-C devices sometimes skip that, and out-of-spec USB-C chargers often (somewhat dangerously) always supply 5V, so the two mistakes sort of cancel out.
Since there aren’t any active chips in these cables, an A to C cable happens to have 5V hot on the usb c side, but this should not be relied on as it isn’t true for C to C
Cheap, bad, shortcuts, etc. will result in an out of spec cable being necessary for an out of spec device to work correctly with an in or out of spec hub. It's terrifically frustrating but a fact of the world.
And this isn't just random no name knockoffs. The Raspberry Pi in certain versions didn't correctly follow the power spec. Both the Nintendo Switch and Switch 2 either incompletely, incorrectly, or intentionally abused the USB spec. The Lumen metabolism monitoring device doesn't follow the USB spec. This is one of those things where you want a bit of a walled garden to force users of a technology to adhere to certain rules. Especially when power and charging is involved which can cause fires.
Found plenty of people online with the same issue but no resolution.
Finally just paid the $25 to get the OEM SteelSeries replacement cable and it charges fully again. wtf… I guess the replacement cable was USB-A to C and I’ve only tried USB-C to C cables?
But I believe the specs are that way to avoid problems with OTG devices. If both devices decide to just push a voltage into the cable at the same time, you risk spending a great deal of energy or even start a fire. That said, there are better ways to deal with this issue; those are just slightly more expensive.
A couple 5.1k resistors add about $0.00001 to the BOM cost. The terrible mistake is on the designers of devices who try to forego these.
Is it a charge only cable (no data)? Is it usb3 5gbps ? Is it 100 watt power delivery? Is it thunderbolt 3/4/5?
For example: Usb 5Gbps is the same regardless of usb 3.0, 3.1 or 3.2 gen 1. In fact, customers dont need to know that "3.0" number. they just need their ports support 5gbps
[0]: https://www.usb.org/sites/default/files/usb_type-c_cable_log...
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 envy you. Realtek NICs (especially over USB) are tantamount to trash in my mind after 2 decades of fighting their frequent failures. Be it failure to initialize at all to driver crashes to pisspoor feature sets (or claiming to have features that don't work at all), and a myriad of other problems. Granted, they usually work in Windows, but I don't work in windows (I live and work in linux/BSD). It has become my personally policy to avoid/disable and realtek NICs and replace them with something actually functional whenever possible.
Hopefully their work on linux-side drivers will change this given their proliferation.
To be honest I've yet to find a reliable USB based network interface regardless of chipset/brand/manufacturer, outside of the ones that do PCIe passthrough via USB4/Thunderbolt and those tend to be quite expensive (though they are starting to come down in price).
Ironically, the only problems I've had with NICs were on an Intel and a Broadcom.
I had a reliability issues using a Realtek 2.5 Gbps USB network interface. Kept locking up, or having latency issues. Until I switched which USB port I plugged it into (one that used a different chipset), and after that it was solid.
Yeah they cost more but they actually work properly.
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...
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