i have never used thunderbolt before, because I knew it was a joke that you couldn't rely on. i have ignored all suggestions that i should solve this problem or that one with a thunderbolt peripheral because i knew it would be a waste of my time and literally any other solution would be more sustainable. i have been fully vindicated.
particularly the "99% of usb cables are counterfeits" bit, is trying to plug in a cintiq
i am constantly marveling at how unclothed this particular emperor (meaning USB, not @thew) is. i have twenty years of experience that say no, actually, all USB cables are fake except for the incredibly stiff 8"-long one that came with your device, and that will stop working after 6 months when a solder joint loosens up. people will tell me they don't have these problems, and that is so hard for me to believe that i've actually wondered if, for some unscrutable reason, they're lying.
the reason i loved it, mainly, is because i have been working with laptops a lot since i got into tech, and i fucking hated wiring up a dozen cables every time i wanted to go from desktop to portable.
so then my office got these amazing new Thinkvision panels from Lenovo. They essentially have a built-in dock, running on USB-C/TB, and on pretty much any decent laptop going these days, you can run one cable to it and it will carry video, inputs, audio, and charging, all at once.
living the dream. one cable to connect and disconnect, no worries.
but my personal "gamer" laptop was starting to get a bit cranky for reasons, and foolishly believing i was in a more permanent living arrangement, i decided to go desktop this go around.
then the fucking nightmare began.
just shopping for a damn motherboard was a nightmare. this board says it has TB and then you look it up and no it doesn't, this board has a USB-C at least but is it TB? the Thinkvision also supports "alternate mode", which is a non-TB protocol for USB 3 gen something or other that can do the magic without TB. Will your board have that too? who fucking knows. you just have to buy one and fucking pray.
So I pick one that's reasonably priced, and proudly comes with all of one (1) USB-C port on the back, which it is so proud of it even has it's own special label on the breakout.
Get it home, plug in my one magic cable, and of course it doesn't fucking work. Fine, OK, I'll just add a fucking thunderbolt card, those exist right? After all "Thunderbolt is just PCI-E over USB-C!" right?
Wrong! They don't fucking exist! There's no such thing as a standard thunderbolt card. Every TB card is proprietary to a specific motherboard, and if the mfg'er does bother to make one for your specific board, you're just fucked, forever. And even if one does, they cost insane amounts of money. Hundreds of dollars, and often only have one fucking port to boot.
So my mfg'er doesn't make a TB board for my chipset/board. So no TB for me. Forever.
I end up just cobbling together some bullshit with a USB-switch so I can still have the inputs going to both my personal and work machines, until a friend tells me about Synergy and I can finally have a usable setup again.
Fuck TB. The Tuberculosis of Inputs.
what i really love about USB C is how absolutely nobody will commit to it. your motherboard has all of one of them if it's mid tier. If it's extremely high end you might get three. laptops are worse.
how long has it been since this was announced as the new standard? How long until we admit it's never going to be more than a forced meme, a thing you're constantly adapting through dongles? People who only ever use two USB devices at a time DNI
I've got a laptop dock at work that I can plug my phone into in a pinch to charge it and it works. But the phone won't use the displays because it doesn't have Alternate Mode, but the hardware supports it, just the firmware is deliberately crippled for some asinine reason. My work laptop works perfectly tho! This is the ideal situation. A single cable to quickly dock a laptop.
There's a second dock at work that I was using before, and everything works except it won't charge my work laptop. Which only has one USB-C port and no barrel jack, so I can't just plug in a second power adapter. But it works with someone else's laptop that also has a dedicated power connector, so we switched docks and they get a two-cable docking experience which is fine.
I have a different model dock I use at home where if I try to plug in my phone it will absolutely lose its mind and rapidly disconnect and reconnect. My laptops mostly work. Audio from this dock to my monitor stutters and nothing I've done seems to fix it. But this dock was supposed to be an upgrade from a cheap little dongle where everything worked perfectly except the dongle itself got violently hot. I paid a lot of money to get a differently bad experience, and now I'm afraid to try getting a different one to get stuck with another disappointment.
I should not have to build this little list of compatible devices and quirks and caveats to use what was sold to me as a super convenient one-cable solution.
No one will plainly list what features their USB-C devices support. This would have been such less headache if I could just look at a damn spec sheet and see that the supported features are mutually incompatible, or even better, if instead of renaming everything to USB 3.2 2x2 FuckYou there was some simple naming scheme that tiered the required feature sets so you would Just Know what's going to work and what isn't, and if something should have worked and didn't, that's clearly a bug. The only thing you can absolutely depend on being there is some type of USB data connection, not even that it's USB 3.0.
From everything I've heard, USB docks are proprietary. Like, yes, in theory they aren't, but in practice, you buy a Dell laptop, then you google "laptop model number dock" and buy the one that Dell says works with it. If you're off by one model number, a third of the dock doesn't work. Nobody can explain why and dells response is "we didn't say that would work."
Some guy on a forum tells you that you can actually use a different model, but it's still just a list of exactly which docks work with exactly which machines. And then of course there's just a 20% chance that even a perfectly matched dock just randomly disconnects throughout the day. "works for me" notwithstanding.
It's almost like docks are so intimately connected to the functionality of the underlying machine that it makes more sense to just use whatever connector and protocol the machines engineers think is appropriate instead of trying to cram it into a generic interface that can't possibly be generic in practice. Has anyone considered this
In fact, without the constraints of a USB cable with a massive plug (to protect the incredibly precise, fragile, and microscopic solder joints inside) and an incredibly stiff cable (because the shielding requirements exceed NASA reqs) you might even be able to use a connector on the bottom of the machine! Wow! Then your dock wouldn't take up much more desk space than the machine itself! Maybe someday somebody will invent this
