Thom

I like USB-C (I'll take what I can get for the One True Charger Plug) but traditional docks are just so good and I miss them

The best part is when you dock and something doesn’t work right away but it might work after several agonizing seconds? Earlier this week I docked my laptop and the monitor turned on and off at least a dozen times before stabilizing in a perfectly working configuration as if nothing was ever wrong. And if it doesn’t work (30% odds) then you have to undock, wait for all the drivers to realize you’ve undocked, and only then redock, or else it still won’t work

lenovo should not have gotten rid of the dock connector on thinkpads

their newest docking station isn't even a real docking station

i never quite understood why every dock seems to have a permanently attached cable. isn't that the point of usb-c?

the stiffness thing reminds me: apple just put out new usb-c cables alongside the new iphone and they've done the impossible and made a usb-c cable that isn't stiff. they don't have a permanent kink to them from being rolled up in the box, there's no resistance to bending them. if they also stay together for longer than a few months, they might've cracked it

Replace its cable with a better one. Get a cable long enough to loop around from your dock to the correct side of your laptop.

Oh right, every single dock has a 2 inch cable molded into it! You can't replace that cable. Oopsy doopsy. Time to buy an extension cable instead, a this-violates-the-usb-c-spec configuration which is only made by the very best sixletter brands.

it comes down to semantics- no usb-c dock is a true 'dock', they are dongles that return all of the necessary and useful legacy IO to over-slimmed laptops

since people will accept them, manufacturers see no value in building laptop cradles with USB-C connectors in the exact right place to properly 'dock' into specific laptops (which would be Cool, but still look a little weird, see the Steam Deck dock)

USB-C socking stations are the dirt fucking worst and I’ll fight anyone who disagrees. We’re currently going through the process of getting rid of 400+ Dell TB16 thunderbolt docks where I work because they’re horribly made, buggy pieces of shit with connectors that literally crumble to plastic dust in your hands, only to find the WD22TB4’s we are replacing them with have flaky ethernet ports!

Not to be some kind of RETVRN asshole, but why we ever stopped making the e-Docks where you drop the laptop down on a big chonky connector and pushed a physical eject button to disconnect the laptop is beyond me. Those never broke ever and didn’t require a fukken 240w power brick besides.

USB-C is my least favorite kind of port, where one port can have wildly different capabilities and speeds yet look identical, and so can the cables.

Hell, at least USB 3.0 ports were usually blue internally to differentiate from 2.0 until recently. And the connector didn't feel like it would break off in a stiff breeze. And I can at least mostly reliably buy 3.0 cables that work after much pain figuring out how and have never managed to get a C cable that runs at a decent speed. but it's symmetrical wooo ugh

Better or worse than DisplayLink though?

I had the opposite problem on my old phone actually, after enough time spent in my nasty pocket it eventually accumulated a whole bunch of lint in the port preventing contact. I got working again after realizing this and going at it with a toothpick, but still, it's kind of wild that this standard port is just a big hole that stuff can fall into and get stuck