Laptop Ports: Is USB-C only fine, or should I get HDMI,USB,Audio if I need them?

Contrary opinion: USB-C sucks for any sort of demanding use case, especially video (i.e., gaming monitors). There are so many different versions and specs that all fit into one lookalike cable/connector but which will fail in various ways, usually at some combination of refresh rate, resolution, HDR, etc. HDMI is so much more reliable (though not without its issues) and DisplayPort is even better, though that's rare to see on a laptop. If your monitor supports a USB-C input, there's a good chance it will work with your laptop (especially Windows), but the situation on Linux and Mac can be very different. If it only has a HDMI input and you don't want to waste time exploring the different USB-C video modes, a HDMI output on the laptop and good cable will make it much, much simpler.

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%.

USB-C IS DisplayPort (among other things). You can get from USB-C to DP "passively", just by signalling the right thing to the USB-C port. The mode is called Alt-Mode and gives you DisplayPort and USB2 or USB3 speeds as a side channel (depending on the amount of bandwidth consumed by the DisplayPort stream). Barring that, some USB-C docks rely on a USB data stream (DisplayLink) and not a DisplayPort stream. Avoid these.

But you can never be sure if a dock will work for your device I am below 40% succes rate. Though I do not really care much about it, luckily it worked at home on first try but it was expensive.

No, you're talking about Thunderbolt. USB-C is the shape of the port, but Displayport over USB-C is called Thunderbolt.

I have had laptops that had USB-C ports that didn't support video.

> Audio is probably fine... the standards there don't change as much.

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.

But there is DP Alternate Mode which is basically allows USB PD + Display Port + USB 2.0

One of the use cases is "almost passive" USB-C dock (typically it has USB 2.0 hub + Ethernet on it).

I don't think this is correct either. The USB C port has to support DP Alt Mode, which not all do, but it doesn't have to be a Thunderbolt port.

More than anything this probably highlights what a mess the standards are.

You are correct: https://www.cablematters.com/Blog/USB-C/what-is-dp-alt-mode

Yes, sometimes, often, usually, but not always! And it's really, REALLY hard to know which is which. No two host/receiver/intermediary devices (all with USB-C) can be guaranteed to support the same over-the-wire protocols, even if they all are technically USB-C. They all look the same and are separated only by some obscure icon or a few letters on the cable. And even if it actually does support the same protocols, there's STILL a good chance that your particular dock/cable/device won't support the "advanced" features like 4k/HDR/high refresh rate.

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.

That probably happens, but if it happens it is due to bad implementations.

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.

Realistically though, isn't most of USB a race to the bottom with bad implementations being the norm, not the exception? USB-C is an especially tragic case of this, with shitty products outnumbering the good ones 100:1, fake reviews everywhere, insane standards with tiny differences, counterfeits, etc. Certifications like Thunderbolt can help but still aren't an absolute guarantee (like with my MacBook and expensive but buggy TB dock).

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.

> (like with my MacBook and expensive but buggy TB dock)

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.