Forgot to mention: I have my laptop connected to a USB keyboard and USB mouse
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I even saw one laptop that only had 2 USB-C ports, with 1 of them to use for charging. (Dell XPS 13 for example)
It's very important for me to connect my laptop to a monitor, and to use earbuds, be connected to ethernet, and to have a charger going, all at the same time. I have an old laptop with an HDMI output port, USB, and direct audio jack for earbuds.
I'm struggling to accept that dongles are fast enough or reliable enough. What if I get a HDMI dongle or audio dongle and the connection keeps dropping on my video calls? A direct connections feels "safer" to me than a USB-C splitter.
What do you think. Should I still look for laptops with direct HDMI/Audio/USB connections, or are USB-C only laptops still reliable enough even if you need a dozen different dongles?
My monitor acts as a dock. My monitor is powering my laptop, handling the video output, and has the keyboard, mouse, headset, and camera connected to it.
All I have to do is plugin one cable and I'm done. It's a good setup. The monitor even has a monitor-to-monitor hub so if I get a second monitor, all I have to do is connect the two monitors. Still only one cable coming to my laptop.
One goes to a dock, providing most of the connectivity and charging, the other goes to two daisy-chained thunderbolt displays.
I'd use a single port if it could drive four monitors.
Except for one ancient HP Z24 screen whose USB-C port is infuriatingly finicky, I'm docking with one USB-C cable without issues with all of my modern equipment (plus USB-C switchers to switch between the desk PC and a mobile device). On occasions where I need the extra I/O, the added weight and volume of the adapters and the dongle inside the sleeve are negligible ; I always have them on hand and can't recall the last time I had an issue with them.
If anything, it's actually cables I usually have problems with.
For display out, the HDMI out is generally more consistent, but nothing really wrong with Display port over usbc, it just sometimes needs plugging/replugging.
If you're only going to be using them in one place (e.g. your home office) then go for a dock - it's nice to have everything connected with a single cable and a number of monitors have suitable docks built in these days.
If you'll want them on the go then yes, I'd at least look for something with the audio and hdmi ports built in just for the convenience factor.
Audio is probably fine... the standards there don't change as much.
Ethernet is hit-or-miss for me. On my Macbook with an expensive ($300ish) dock, the port works 90% of the time... 10% of the time it'll just randomly shut off until restart. Another USB-C ethernet dongle (with only that one port) works 100% of the time. But either is a PITA compared to a built-in ethernet port in the laptop.
I don't have a choice now that I've gone to Macs, but if I were buying a Windows/Linux workstation PC, I'd absolutely get all the ports I can – ESPECIALLY HDMI and ethernet. USB-C is a nice idea with terrible real-world implementations that are usually 75% compatible but almost never 100%.
Be more specific, as USB4 w/ TB4 support can be ok for almost anything.
Most dongles are absolute crap, though. Caldigit is the only brand I trust.
[1] https://www.lenovo.com/us/en/p/coming-soon/lenovo-thinkpad-t...
So I'm very happy that this laptop, though still quite thin, actually has two USB-A ports (USB 3.0), on the sides. It's also nice sometimes to be able to plug in an HDMI monitor if I'm not at my desk/home, without needing to carry a stupid dongle.
If I wanted to I could plug my headphones (3.5mm or usb) into the monitor which is also a USB hub.
Plug in one cable and I'm done.
Note: Most docking hubs only support a feature of DisplayPort called MST to run two monitors off a single connection. The USB-C connection to the hub is using something called Alt Mode to carry the video signal using DisplayPort protocol. MacOS only supports MST in mirror mode over USB. It needs to be Thunderbolt for full MST support with dual, unique displays.
I found a monitor that had a USB-C connection with charging, a USB hub, ethernet etc. (of which there were very few back in 2015). When I was somewhere other than my own desk, the Apple HDMI dongle was more than good enough.
The only "this sucks" scenario was when I had the opportunity to use multiple external models, but couldn't. Aside from that, I don't regret getting that laptop.
Check them out. It's probably the best decision I have taken in terms of technology in years.
So for example, at home and work have a docking with all cable (headset, keyboard, mouse). If I'm "outside" I will typically NOT take calls, and NOT use keyboard or other peripherals....
Last but not least, for many laptops there are "dongles" without cable, that act like a little extension of the housing of the laptop. They are pretty convenient.
As long as you don't care about latency.
For example, if you wind up with your 4K monitor sharing the same PCI-E lanes as your low latency audio device, you're in for a world of hurt.
Note: the problem here isn't USB-C, per se, as much as the fact that a device over USB-C can request so much data that it can hog the backend bus enough to cause issues with latency.
You could also attach a USB audio DAC for headphones which might be handy since non-Apple laptop DACs aren’t very good.
I'm very much happy with the laptop and its build quality. But most of all, I love the flexibility to not be stuck with just 2 USB-C and needing dongles/docks. I can have them if I want to, but I don't need to rely on them.
I think you don't need to compromise: laptops do exist that can have everything.
[1] https://www.tuxedocomputers.com/en/TUXEDO-InfinityBook-Pro-1... - Laptop is fully configurable, you can choose to have Windows as the primary OS and can choose between AMD or Intel CPU (my link is for the AMD one)
More than anything this probably highlights what a mess the standards are.
If you need to work in more than one place frequently enough that you want monitors there, buy two docking stations. Compared to the laptop itself they're extremely cheap. Docking stations allow the one cable going to your laptop to act as your power cable, your HDMI cables, your audio cable, your ethernet cable, your USB cables to your external camera etc, and so on, all at the same time.
Another benefit of docking stations is that you only need to handle a single cable when unplugging or connecting your laptop. This may save you a few minutes but more importantly it will also reduce the hassle by reducing the number of things that can go wrong and that you have to pay attention to. If there's no docking station from your laptop's manufacturer just make sure it supports Thunderbolt 3 and get a docking station compatible with that, e.g. the ones from Lenovo. They also almost always come with multiple video ports.
Yes, there are scenarios where you might not want to lug around an entire docking station but still would like to be able to connect something to your laptop other than a power cable, e.g. when giving a presentation externally, but in those cases just bring a USB-C dongle for whatever you need. You're probably not going to need to set up an entire workstation for that and if you do need a second cable (e.g. HDMI for presentation, ethernet for Internet access) that's literally still a battery-powered device we're talking about.
Dongles are a hassle and I avoid them as much as I can.
I bought a usbc monitor and run everything from there to the computer with one cable (power, video, keyboard). It’s fine I guess but I still carry a charger when I’m out, an hdmi adapter (most monitors you meet in the world are still hdmi) and a usb an adapter. (Printers). I used to carry an Ethernet adapter, but I only really used it for networking scanning and I don’t really take those contracts anymore.
All things being equal I’d choose the additional ports, but the primary reason to get rid of them is form factor. You can make the machine a lot smaller by removing ports. I don’t really give a crap about that since I carry the other stuff anyway but your mileage may vary. I like the framework idea I may switch to that next time.
Then again you’ll be running windows on it so the computer is ruined anyway so it doesn’t matter what you choose or what you spend.
It's never plug-and-play, it's more like buy, return, buy, return, research, buy, scream, thrash, cry, and go back to HDMI/big DisplayPort in my experience.
Specific to the OP, my work laptop is plugged into one dock that manages power, ethernet, USB-A adapters, and 4k 30FPS HDMI. It also has an unused VGA, SD & Micro SD. It's a nice amount of functionality for only consuming one Thunderbolt-capable USB-C port.
USB is not like Ethernet, in USB it is possible to reserve an amount of data transfer capacity for latency-sensitive applications like audio and then none of the other users of the USB interface can use it during the reserved time intervals.
If a USB audio device does not use this kind of data transfers with reserved bandwidth (isochronous transfer), its designers have been incompetent.
If the audio is transferred over DisplayPort or over HDMI, then there the time intervals for transferring it are reserved too, so it must not be influenced by anything that is transferred at the same time.
Problems with audio being perturbed by other transfers over PCIe, before reaching the USB controller or the GPU for audio over DisplayPort or HDMI, are unlikely to be caused by hardware but by the operating system, which might not give adequate priority to the audio transfers.
Anyone can make a USB-C peripheral. Very few companies can make a GOOD one.
It doesn't matter what the on-paper specs are if 95% of real world applications are crap... the UX for consumers sucks.
Blame Apple, not the docks.
I couldn't keep any USB-A peripheral connected to my MacBook Pro through any dongle or dock alive for more than about 30 minutes. I must have tried 6 or 7 docks and a dozen dongles. All of them would fail and I would have to reboot to get it back.
I could pinpoint the OS version upgrade that broke everything as I managed to have two MacBook Pros with different OS versions. The bug followed the OS version on restore. The thread on Apple support for it is HUGE. I even tried paid escalation. Nope.
That was the final straw the drove me off of Apple and onto Linux for my laptop full-time. At least with Linux I can figure out what the hell is going wrong. Maybe Apple is nicer, but if you aren't on what Apple regards as the pure happy path--"Here be Dragons".
Maybe the docks are bad, but I would put way more blame on Apple. macOS simply isn't getting the resources it really needs.