Docks and dongles and cables and adapters and… Well, there’s a lot of options on the market. I’ve got a couple requirements in addition to the ports provided by the new 14” MacBook Pro, and some things to make tech travel a bit more flexible.
I wiped this down, and moments later… Still more dust.
The Workstation
The Macbook is a workstation replacement, and as such is spending a lot of it’s time connected to my Dell 49” super ultra wide. It’s currently connected via a single USB-C cable offering power and video, and that’s fine for the apartment as we’re fully wireless and I really have no desk room for additional things like speakers, etc. In the house however, we’ll be wiring for ethernet and I’ll have the desk room for speakers again! I’m looking at a single cable solution with all the right ports.
The Wants:
Front and rear 3.5mm audio jacks
Minimum 2 thunderbolt ports
Thunderbolt ports on the rear of the dock only
PCIe based ethernet
Silver colour
Lower price point preferred
I went through a lot of research on dock options from the very top end to the very bottom of the barrel, and I’ve found one that seems to stand out above the rest for my wants. The ethernet controller and connection can be a bit hard to find, however this blog did a lot of the work categorizing them, and it made it very easy to figure out the right option for me.
And the winner is… The Belkin Thunderbolt 3 Express Dock HD. It hits all the above points and comes in at a very attractive price point on the secondary market. One could argue that it would be nice to have additional type C USB ports, or a built in SD card reader, but in reality I connect very little to my computer as is, and I can utilize either the SD card reader on the Macbook or one of the other USB options I have kicking around.
For the time being this will give me fast and reliable gigabit ethernet, 3.5mm audio, a headset jack in the front just in case, and the option to leave my Samsung T5 connected while docked, all from a single cable. I was able to scoop one on eBay for around $100 shipped, which is a wild price compared to the $349 MSRP. It does have a few markings due to previous use, but nothing astoundingly bad. I’m pretty happy with it, though I suppose it’d be nice to have a bit of a longer Thunderbolt cable - Nothing I can’t buy later though.
On The Go
I’ve been overhauling the dongle/accessory kit for on-the-go as well. This kit should cover all use cases I could have for mobile work on the go, and be cross compatible between the iPad and the MacBook. USB type C makes this fairly flexible, but like with Thunderbolt, there’s so many bad options on the market. The purpose of the travel/on-the-go accessories are to make sure I can do just about anything I need to while out and about, and also take up minimal space.
The Wants:
Flexibility across multiple devices
First party dongles where possible
Cover all possible scenarios in a small package
These are the pieces below I’ve picked out so far:
The Audio Kit
This one is straight forward and replaced the lightning EarPods in my camera bag.
A big ol’ nest. These actually live in an old Etymotic soft case, with the adapters separated inside the case.
Apple USB-C to 3.5mm adapter
Apple Lightning to 3.5mm adapter
Apple 3.5mm EarPods
These are realistically a stop-gap emergency kind of thing in case whatever wireless headphones I have at the time are dead and I really need audio. They sound generally agreeable but lack any isolation. I may consider a swap for a set of Etymotic HF3s instead of the Earpods, or re-appropriating my Apple in ear IEMs from my partner, but the adapters will allow whatever headphones are connected to work across all three of my devices.
The Data Kit
This one covers all data options from video to internet to file transfer. I have no reason to believe my on-the-go use will require using these ports more than sparingly, but I’d still like high quality, functional pieces.
Apple USB Type-C Digital AV Multiport Adapter
Apple USB Type-C to SD card reader
Apple Lightning to SD card reader
DLink DUB-E250 2.5Gbe USB Type-C to 2.5 gigabit ethernet adapter
I had a Plugable 7-in-1 hub which was fine, but these pieces offer a much higher quality, lighter experience than a cheaper all-in-one unit. The SD card readers function flawlessly, the digital AV multiport adapter does 4K 60fps with HDR support off the HDMI port, and the USB type-A port nets me full speeds off my real fast 64gb Lexar P20 flash drive (200+mbps reads/writes). The DLink adapter was chosen for it’s 2.5gb/s support, and it also has an NCM driver in MacOS, which offloads the processing from CPU to the adapter itself. Although the Macbook isn’t a slouch, seeing a full core’s worth of processing power consumed by a big data transfer is a bit silly. These pieces look great, feel great, and work great.
The Charging Kit
My Baseus GAN charger is actually great here, but the 65w max and only two type C ports is a bit of a drag if I want to charge everything at once and fast. I want to try to remove as much cabling as I can, so a higher wattage type-c only adapter and a few better cables are on the horizon for sure.
It’s about half the size of the 96w Apple charger
Satechi 108w 3 port GAN charger
Anker Powerline iii Flow 6ft Type-C to Type-C cable
The Satechi is a relatively new charger that’s compact thanks to GAN technology and offers 3 type-C ports and no type-A ports. It supports a charging output of 58w+30w+20w when fully loaded, which coincidentally is plenty for a Macbook, iPad Pro, and iPhone all at once. This should let me drop all my Type-A cables from my kit other than my InCharge X, which is awesome. I’ve swapped my 60w Anker 6ft cable with an Anker Powerline iii Flow cable, which should let me take advantage of 100w fast charging on the Macbook when nothing else is in use. I may end up swapping my other cables for Powerline iii Flow cables as well, depending on how this one works out.
I have no doubt there’ll be more doodads and dongles to fill my pockets and pouches with in the future, but for now this is a pretty comfortable collection. Now, if only I could find a tech pouch that fits the bill a bit better…Stay tuned for that I guess.