Relatedly, why can't I get a simple USB-C hub? I have four USB-C ports on my laptop and I need six. Back in the USB-A days, I'd just get a $30 hub and four new full speed ports at the cost of one on the laptop.
But now if I want three more full speed ports, I have to get a four port dock/hub that costs $179 and has to get plugged into the wall.
Am I not looking correctly or is there some technical limitation I'm not aware of or ...?
Edit: It seems like the consensus is basically "people wouldn't read the specs", which is a fair criticism. USB-C supports so many different types of devices that it would be impossible to make one that supports them all, and if you support a subset people would get mad that their device isn't in that subset.
One interesting takeaway for me was that there are actually some quite cheap hubs available from AliExpress and the "branded" ones are essentially the same with a logo printed on (and hopefully some additional QA).
Very unlikely. For this sort of thing it’s always been safe to assume that Amazon or EBay are AliExpress with faster domestic shipping and better customer service - that is what the premium is buying you.
USB hubs are only one of many items that are sold rebadged or not on both Amazon and Ali.
I think i posted about it on that previous discussion, but my solution to this was to buy the plugable 3 port only-a-tb4/usb3-hub which let me be more selective about the other parts i used with it and I’ve been really happy with that.
It’s not cheap either but at least it’s flexible and will be useable for a long time as my needs change. I’ve been really happy with it.
I think these all in one things are always gonna cheap out on something in the end.
I picked this 3.2 Gen 2 hub for 10 bux, 10gbs, 3.2 usb, works great. I use it for my dual port keyboard + mouse, so I can just plug into my laptop or pc, so I only have to move 1 cable. Not sure why backwards compatible with usb 2 is a bad thing.
You’d hope so, but I wouldn’t be too confident. The Satechi USB-C hub that my wife got (reboxed Chinese design) claimed to support 4k@60Hz, except that it didn’t work. Afterwards we found that other people had the same issue. Satechi support provided some undocumented Realtek firmware updater for Windows that didn’t work.
Can confirm, but not sure about better QA of the branded ones. Company issued macbook came with a "Satechi" hub, which died within 6 months, while two other noname AliExpress ones have worked with no issue for 2 years now
Tons of answers here. I think, if you want complex usb-pd offerings, you need to accept a pretty high $$$ price for all those power regulation subsystems you are demanding. I would be surprised to hear that indeed all the current offerings require wall power, that none can operate off laptop/uplink- I think you are wrong. But perhaps.
Overall I think the main current barrier to entry has been usb-c alt modes. If someone plugs a hdmi adapter into one of the hubs ports, ehat happens then? USB3+C's crazy lane splitting has been pretty suboptimal for figuring out what the role of a hub really is in the world today.
USB4 at least fixes that, makes usb a packet switched transport that tunnels other protocols. Now if someome plugs a displayport adapter into a hub, it's just going to use bandwidth. The whole tree under the usb-root doesnt have to totslly rebuild itself to make available a lane for some other purpose. The flexibility of usb-c, with it's two channels, is a complexity we've only finally specified a proper means to make use of. It's getting better. Looking forward to some other companies starting to offer hub chips, seeing this young new scene begin to evolve.
My understanding is that Displayport is already packetized, having USB4 packetize it again seems suboptimal? I think both Displayport and HDMI have official specs that work over the USB-C connector.
> I would be surprised to hear that indeed all the current offerings require wall power, that none can operate off laptop/uplink- I think you are wrong. But perhaps.
Indeed, there are products that don't require wall power. I got a Chinese model [0] off Amazon that does Ethernet + 4K@60 over DP/HDMI (alt-mode, not DisplayLink) and can even drive an external spinning drive, all from the USB connection from the PC. The catch is that it comes with a dual-port cable, meaning it requires two (adjacent!) ports to work. I haven't tried it with a regular cable, so I don't know whether that's a hard requirement. It's also able to do PD pass-through if you connect it to a wall.
One downside is that I've sometimes had the screen go dark for a second, and other people have complained about this on the Amazon page. So it's not clear how reliable this will be in the long run.
Does USB4 tunnel original USB (1.0-2.0), or is that still on its own separate pins? I was under the impression that electrical and timing requirements meant it was virtually impossible to tunnel it while remaining in spec.
Isn't the problem that anyone making such a device would have to deal with an endless stream of returns from customers who assumed they could just plug anything with the right form factor in only to discover that no, the bargain hub won't handle Thunderbolt, or 100W PD, or...
And display outputs too. What happens if the user plugs in multiple displays to the hub could be an important scenario to support...
(and for example, macOS doesn't support DisplayPort MST, requiring an encapsulation over Thunderbolt to support that scenario...)
tldr: it'd be possible to make such a hub, but it's so complexity fraught that a _lot_ of companies would avoid doing it, USB Type-C is just too complex.
This was the story moving from USB 1 to 2, and this is still the story for people trying to charge their laptop (USB-A to C cable) from a random phone charger or an underpowered USB-A hub.
Coupled with the nightmare of guessing which USB-C cable supports what, I have the feeling preventing us from further confusion has never been a decisive factor in product making.
But isn't that already the case with the ports directly on computers?
I have a laptop that can do USB 3.2 (or something). I can charge it through those ports, but it doesn't do Thunderbolt of any kind.
I have a small desktop in front of me that's power through an external adaptor, like a laptop. It has a USB-C port that doesn't do video output of any kind and which can't be used to power the computer. It has another USB-C port with a bolt on top of it. It does thunderbolt, it can output video (I've driven an Apple TB display with it), but still can't be powered through it. It also doesn't output video through the USB-C dock, which works on the laptop.
I have another laptop with a USB-C port with the bolt on it, and it can be powered through that port.
These are all ports directly on the computer, no hubs required.
> Relatedly, why can't I get a simple USB-C hub? I have four USB-C ports on my laptop and I need six. Back in the USB-A days, I'd just get a $30 hub and four new full speed ports at the cost of one on the laptop.
The problem is that, I believe, a USB-C port is effectively required to provide a minimum of 5V at 3A on every port. I believe that USB 3 only requires 5V at 0.9A and USB 2.0 only requires 500mA (you nominally have to negotiate up to 500mA from 100mA--but nobody ever does that they just suck down 500mA without paying attention).
At that point, you can see how much more power USB-C is shoveling around. A 4-port hub is shoveling 60W minimum for USB-C, roughly 20W maximum for USB 3 and roughly 10W maximum for USB 2.
And, to be fair, life wasn't magically better in the USB 2 hub days. I have had loads of USB 2.0 hubs that do screwball things once they get a little overdrawn on their power. I eventually discovered that a good way to predict reliability of my USB 2 hubs was to look at the amperage of the wall wart that they shipped with it (the bigger the better).
And USB 3 isn't automatically better. I literally just had to replace a whole bunch of old, very nice, very stable, aluminum wedge USB 3 hubs because Microsoft updated something and simply plugging them in would blue screen the computer. Once I bought all new plastic chintztastic USB 3 hubs, Windoze is now happy. Microsoft can go die in a fire.
The standard is bonkers, and encapsulates other complex standards for kicks. Implementation requires a bunch of different chips and using the correct, unlabeled wire that is identical. My company is the proud owners of about 50,000 USB-C and USB—C/Thunderbolt docks.
They are both amazing and awful. One vendors thunderbolt dock is better than the plain USB-C, another is the opposite. Minor, undocumented differences in firmware or chip revisions may have a major impact on quality. One OEM’s driver bricked laptops.
When stuff works, it’s amazing to the point that it seems impossible. Some higher end workstations are pushing 5x more IO than a (admittedly aging) midrange SAN that’s on the floor can.
Replace the USB-A ports in the above with USB-C ports, and it's what the GP poster is imagining.
But, for some reason, nobody makes that.
Even though it'd be USB-3.1 either way; even though you can plug USB-A-to-C cables into this hub, and it'd be exactly the same as plugging USB-C-to-C cables into a hypothetical USB-C-replicating hub.
Alternatively, any old existing usb3 hub plus usb-a to usb-c adapters will give you a lot more flexibility.
I finally went ahead & bought a decent quantity of adapters- they're tiny, cheap, and add lots of flexibility. They have helped me consolidate my cable collection significantly while retaining a bunch of charging devices I already had installed.
Once you start trying to layer in usb-pd things get much much more complex. But, as a bus for peripherals, longstanding usb hubs do more than fine.
The problem is the plethora of features USB-C supports, and the bandwidth required to pass them all downstream. In other words, you need to passthru PCIe to the hub, and break out to USB-C and other ports from there,
Which is simply expensive.
On the other hand, Kingston's Nucleum is a nice hub. It provides two additional USB-C ports with PD support in one of them, provides two USB 3.0 USB-A ports, a proper card reader and an HDMI port.
I take photos and my camera produces 50MB images, and carrying them over a nice card reader which can use the full bandwidth of the card is nice, and Nucleum delivers.
I looked into how USB 2 unpowered hubs work and it sounds like "not very well."
For example, Anker sells a USB 3 hub and it's up to the user to make sure that whatever is plugged into it doesn't exceed 900 milliamps.
I'm thinking that a good way to go would be to get a hub that connects to a USB-C port and lets you plug in USB 2/3 devices? That way there's plenty of power for them without needing a power adapter. Plus USB 2 devices are cheaper.
Speaking with my usability hat on (my degree is human machine interaction) that isn't a useful question as there is one correct answer: plug whatever devices in, in whatever order and combination.
I use a USB-C to USB-A converter, plug in an old USB-A hub, and plug USB-A to USB-C converters into each port.
Works great. You'll be stuck with USB 2.0 speeds, but it connects to, passes data to, and charges every single dumb device I have with no problems. Mice, keyboard, USB-C headphones, my phone, other laptops that charge over USB-C... and that's all I ever really wanted.
> Apple's 2-USB-C-port laptop was literal insanity.
Actually... I do get the idea. 99.9% of the time I only use one of my four USB-C/TB ports, and that's for power. The other 0.1% is when I connect my Android phone for a firmware update (it's rooted, so have to go the hard way) or an SD card reader.
Relatedly, why can't I get a simple USB-C hub? I have four USB-C ports on my laptop and I need six. Back in the USB-A days, I'd just get a $30 hub and four new full speed ports at the cost of one on the laptop.
But now if I want three more full speed ports, I have to get a four port dock/hub that costs $179 and has to get plugged into the wall.
I'd be happy paying the $179, as long as I was sure the stupid thing did everything the port on my laptop does. And didn't require external power.
Right now, we're paying the $179, unsure if it actually does what we think (because the specs are so insane), and it's less usable. USB-C, in practice, is a giant step backwards. In theory, it's amazing, and when it works, it really is amazing, but holy crap, what a bowl of spaghetti.
> as long as I was sure the stupid thing did everything the port on my laptop does. And didn't require external power.
As I understand if you want it to do everything your laptop port does and expect to be able to use more than one port at a time there is absolutely no way around external power. And if you can only use one port at a time it's an adapter not a hub. You're asking for the impossible.
From my experience it never was simple in USB-A days either. The cheap hubs or the one mounted on the desk just didn't provide enough voltage. Sure, it might work to run your mouse (if it's not a fancy one with LEDs), but good luck connecting an external HDD to one.
The limitation is that by wanting a USB-C hub, you've painted a dollar sign on your head. USB-A hubs are cheap and plentiful, and for many applications work fine with C devices with an A->C cable. If that's not sufficient, you must be a big spender.
This doesn't seem accurate at all. There are cheap usb-c hubs which only pass down the usb3 capabilities. The expense comes down when you want to be driving 4k monitors, 1gbit ethernet, and charging your laptop through the same hub and cable which requires both extremely high speed data exchange combined with heavy duty power transfer and management.
> I have four USB-C ports on my laptop and I need six.
I have four USB ports on my laptop and I need three. Unfortunately two are C and all my cables are A.
I really wouldn't mind if USB-C just went away. I've got a single device with a C plug (which came with an A to C charging cable, of course) and some other brand new charging cables won't charge it if I don't hold the cable pushed in manually. Not sure if the cables are bad or the hole. I also find it harder to plug in than micro (maybe because there's no narrow point on the plug which you can put in the middle of the hole and then move it to the edge to automatically align it perfectly) and hate the metal on metal sound/feeling this gives. The plug seems to be badly designed compared to the other USB ports (never had this issue, from A to B to mini to micro to micro B) and very often has incompatibilities where you're just guessing whether a display is going to work at all.
And then there's the ports problem. I've got a number of old cheap USB hubs laying around, like every techie I guess, but C hubs? Well... So this can now all go in the trash. We should stop this madness and come up with a better plug rather than a worse one, if we need to change all hardware anyway we might as well do it right the first time.
I have a Platinet 4 port USB 3.x hub/docker (USB-C uplink) that doesn't need a external power, however I didn't benchmark the speed, but I don't have the disconnection problems that I had with unpowered 2.0 Hubs.
Indeed, it's the chipsets that are the limit. The IP is complex, so there's no one who really wants to design whole new cut-down silicon to implement a "simple" USB 3 dock with fewer features to sell for less money. And since the chipset supports it, and technically you can't certify it as USB 3 without it (not that all these devices are fully certified), you might as well just use what the chipset gives you. In fact, in terms of implementation, that's probably the easiest as you just follow the reference design. So that's what they do.
USB 1 and 2 were relatively simple protocols, and had very low energy profile (I think max power on the original USB 2.0 spec is 2.5W (5V, 0.5A) [0]. Same with bandwidth.
Back in USB 2.0 days, a single port could consume at most 480 Mbps in bandwidth, so let's say that your typical USB 2.0 hub consumed at most 2Gbps. That's very easy to accomplish in terms of I/O [1] (1 PCIe Gen 1.0 x1 port).
Now imagine 4 USB 3.2 or eventually 4.0 full speed ports: that is 20 Gbps per port, and Thunderbolt 3 has 40 Gbps per port. That means a 4-port HUB would need to have I/O capabilities of 80 or 160 Gbps. That is even beyond PCI express 4.0 w/ 4 lanes (8GB/s). A single Thunderbolt 3 port can consume theoretically half as much as the best and fastest NVMe SSDs (around 7 GB/s).
Basically, what I am trying to say is that it is getting harder and harder to achieve with USB 3.2 (and eventually 4.0) what was easy to do with USB 2.0. Our computers are just not getting fast enough to support all these I/O speeds. That's why most PCIe extension cards only offer a single USB-C port. A standard PCIe Gen 4.0 1x port cannot even support that at top speed!.
Take a look at this card [2]: a single USB port doesn't even support 20Gbps speeds, and half the ports share the same 10Gbps bandwidth. And this card requires a PCIe 3.0 x4 port.
And this is just bandwith. In terms of power, it is pretty much the same issue, Power Delivery can consume 100W at most. That's more power than the normal draw of a typical "ultrabook" laptop (around 60-65W). Now imagine 4 of these, 400W. That's a standard desktop PC PSU requirement.
tl;dr it is just not possible to support this much I/O speed and power draw with cheap consumer technology. That's why good USB 3.2 and Thunderbolt 3 hubs cost much, much more than USB 2.0 ever did. Also why they are much more complicated devices.
Related: When designing small electronics devices, my go to for plug-in power and simple data transmission (including serial-over-USB) is USB-C. It's small, reversible, and common due to phone chargers... and you can still wire it up and use it easily by just using the D+/- lines, power, and ground. (With appropriate CC resistors etc)
And the best part is that you don't even need a connector, you can just build it right into your PCB! USB-A also lets you do a PCB-only connector, but if you're doing anything that requires a cable instead of just plugging directly into a port, it's a lot more annoying to require a USB-A extension cable than any USB-C cable.
Do you have an example for such a "USB-C edge connector"? Intuitively I would have said that common PCB thickness is too large, or do I misunderstand what you mean?
I don’t understand, my new iPhone 13 came with a usb-c to lightning cable. My new iPad is usb-c too as well as my new kindle and new Sony camera. Even my vape has usb-c!
I can appreciate the presence of USB 2.0 as I have experienced issues with RF/noise on USB 3.
Wireless headphones… wireless mice… so yeah all 2.4ghz transceivers basically… lossy garbage connections have me tracing down old USB 2.0 ports on my PCs still today.
Leakage tests really should be a strongly enforced part certification. I still find myself taking apart products to add foil tape to them. Go nerdy me I guess?
Almost none of them are long enough to comfortably put a laptop on a stand and have the hub on the desk. If they would at least make the cables a bit longer it wouldn't be such a pain.
This explains soooo much, I had the Dell TB16, and sometimes, under certain conditions the mouse would cause the ethernet connection to reset, or vis versa.
I have a Caldigit USB-C pro dock with a macbook pro m1 plugged into it, and I have been having random and inconsistent (sometimes once or twice a day, other times nothing for a couple of weeks) sudden devices disconnection. What's weird is that suddenly my keyboard, audio out and ethernet stops working, but my 4k monitor plugged in Display Port keeps working without a hitch.
I'm pretty sure it's an issue with the USB controller, and the article convinced me more, but I still have zero clue on how to begin troubleshooting an issue like that.
With every USB-C and/or TB hub/dock that I've ever used (including a Kensington SD5200T), I'd have periodic drop outs of my Plantronics wireless headset's connection. Directly connected to the laptop, never a problem.
Most recently, I've been using a Belkin 11-in-1 USB-C dock. I just checked, and I had it plugged into the USB 2.0 port on the dock before I moved it back to directly connected to my laptop. I've just plugged the headset back into one of the 3.0 ports, since this article says external 3.0 ports may not share like this article states.
I wonder if every other dock I've used, I've also been plugging into USB 2.0 ports that are sharing 3.0 ports...
It's also worth noting that DP and USB 3 lanes are shared. You can't use USB 3 when using a video mode that utilizes all 4 lanes (which is also why plenty of these hubs are limited to 4k30Hz on older DP revisions when they don't partition the lanes dynamically, as that's the most you can get out of 2 lanes).
I like the TB4 page. But I wish there were some deep level reviews.
I've tried every brand name TB3 dock. At least at the time, there were no simple "power expander" type docks, just the kind with a variety of ports. They are all buggy af. Although people do rave about the reliability of CalDigit, it's also buggy IME. I think people plug and unplug. If you leave any of these plugged in at all times, they all crash in some way.
Now with TB4, I have an Anker simple 1-up 3-down compact dock. It works great in my testing and I'm happy to use dongles as the dock isn't portable anyway. But I had to put it in the drawer for the future, since it only works in TB3 mode with Bug Sir and above, and I'm holding out with Catalina as long as possible.
I think people plug and unplug. If you leave any of these plugged in at all times, they all crash in some way.
Do you mean keep plugged in the laptop or keep the dock plugged into power all the time?
I have three StarTech Thunderbolt 3 docks and so far no issues. Except that the first two that I bought have a Realtek NIC (which has subpar performance on macOS). The third has an Intel I210 and I am completely happy with the dock.
Plugged into the laptop (and into power) at all times. I found if I was moving the laptop from location to location (home to work, etc), most of the docks performed well. But if I leave my laptop for a week, eg only removing it on the weekend, all of the TB3 docks get squirrelly and in need of reset. Seems they all have problems with sleep or hibernate type situations -- even though macs don't hibernate unless on 2% power.
Nowadays I use amphetamine and never let my laptop sleep or display sleep while on power, ever. I also now set my display to never enter energy saver mode. I don't have to gumption to go back and retest any TB3 docks with those settings though. I rather like the Anker TB4 I have now.
IIRC I found CalDigit to be the most reliable, but it too would eventually crash or otherwise become invisible to the Mac.
Readit News
But now if I want three more full speed ports, I have to get a four port dock/hub that costs $179 and has to get plugged into the wall.
Am I not looking correctly or is there some technical limitation I'm not aware of or ...?
Edit: It seems like the consensus is basically "people wouldn't read the specs", which is a fair criticism. USB-C supports so many different types of devices that it would be impossible to make one that supports them all, and if you support a subset people would get mad that their device isn't in that subset.
USB-C hubs and my slow descent into madness
https://overengineer.dev/blog/2021/04/25/usb-c-hub-madness.h...
It was recently discussed on HN https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30911598
One interesting takeaway for me was that there are actually some quite cheap hubs available from AliExpress and the "branded" ones are essentially the same with a logo printed on (and hopefully some additional QA).
Very unlikely. For this sort of thing it’s always been safe to assume that Amazon or EBay are AliExpress with faster domestic shipping and better customer service - that is what the premium is buying you.
USB hubs are only one of many items that are sold rebadged or not on both Amazon and Ali.
It’s not cheap either but at least it’s flexible and will be useable for a long time as my needs change. I’ve been really happy with it.
I think these all in one things are always gonna cheap out on something in the end.
This one: https://plugable.com/products/tbt4-hub3c
Plugged into it is two monitors with usbc->hdmi cables (I think they use dp lanes internally) and one usb-a+ethernet hub. That's all I really need.
I use USB-A hubs and an A to C adapter and that is FAR FAR better on the vaunted M1 macs for external keyboard+USB.
Fancy 200 dollar hubs? Lose my basic keyboard/mouse.
USB: a dumpster fire going on 25 years now.
https://www.amazon.com/Inateck-Ports-Speed-Cable-HB2025A/dp/...
You’d hope so, but I wouldn’t be too confident. The Satechi USB-C hub that my wife got (reboxed Chinese design) claimed to support 4k@60Hz, except that it didn’t work. Afterwards we found that other people had the same issue. Satechi support provided some undocumented Realtek firmware updater for Windows that didn’t work.
Overall I think the main current barrier to entry has been usb-c alt modes. If someone plugs a hdmi adapter into one of the hubs ports, ehat happens then? USB3+C's crazy lane splitting has been pretty suboptimal for figuring out what the role of a hub really is in the world today.
USB4 at least fixes that, makes usb a packet switched transport that tunnels other protocols. Now if someome plugs a displayport adapter into a hub, it's just going to use bandwidth. The whole tree under the usb-root doesnt have to totslly rebuild itself to make available a lane for some other purpose. The flexibility of usb-c, with it's two channels, is a complexity we've only finally specified a proper means to make use of. It's getting better. Looking forward to some other companies starting to offer hub chips, seeing this young new scene begin to evolve.
Indeed, there are products that don't require wall power. I got a Chinese model [0] off Amazon that does Ethernet + 4K@60 over DP/HDMI (alt-mode, not DisplayLink) and can even drive an external spinning drive, all from the USB connection from the PC. The catch is that it comes with a dual-port cable, meaning it requires two (adjacent!) ports to work. I haven't tried it with a regular cable, so I don't know whether that's a hard requirement. It's also able to do PD pass-through if you connect it to a wall.
One downside is that I've sometimes had the screen go dark for a second, and other people have complained about this on the Amazon page. So it's not clear how reliable this will be in the long run.
---
[0] https://www.amazon.fr/gp/product/B09MTTZ36K
Guess that means the next logical step is to evolve USB into ethernet.
(and for example, macOS doesn't support DisplayPort MST, requiring an encapsulation over Thunderbolt to support that scenario...)
tldr: it'd be possible to make such a hub, but it's so complexity fraught that a _lot_ of companies would avoid doing it, USB Type-C is just too complex.
Coupled with the nightmare of guessing which USB-C cable supports what, I have the feeling preventing us from further confusion has never been a decisive factor in product making.
I have a laptop that can do USB 3.2 (or something). I can charge it through those ports, but it doesn't do Thunderbolt of any kind.
I have a small desktop in front of me that's power through an external adaptor, like a laptop. It has a USB-C port that doesn't do video output of any kind and which can't be used to power the computer. It has another USB-C port with a bolt on top of it. It does thunderbolt, it can output video (I've driven an Apple TB display with it), but still can't be powered through it. It also doesn't output video through the USB-C dock, which works on the laptop.
I have another laptop with a USB-C port with the bolt on it, and it can be powered through that port.
These are all ports directly on the computer, no hubs required.
The problem is that, I believe, a USB-C port is effectively required to provide a minimum of 5V at 3A on every port. I believe that USB 3 only requires 5V at 0.9A and USB 2.0 only requires 500mA (you nominally have to negotiate up to 500mA from 100mA--but nobody ever does that they just suck down 500mA without paying attention).
At that point, you can see how much more power USB-C is shoveling around. A 4-port hub is shoveling 60W minimum for USB-C, roughly 20W maximum for USB 3 and roughly 10W maximum for USB 2.
And, to be fair, life wasn't magically better in the USB 2 hub days. I have had loads of USB 2.0 hubs that do screwball things once they get a little overdrawn on their power. I eventually discovered that a good way to predict reliability of my USB 2 hubs was to look at the amperage of the wall wart that they shipped with it (the bigger the better).
And USB 3 isn't automatically better. I literally just had to replace a whole bunch of old, very nice, very stable, aluminum wedge USB 3 hubs because Microsoft updated something and simply plugging them in would blue screen the computer. Once I bought all new plastic chintztastic USB 3 hubs, Windoze is now happy. Microsoft can go die in a fire.
The standard is bonkers, and encapsulates other complex standards for kicks. Implementation requires a bunch of different chips and using the correct, unlabeled wire that is identical. My company is the proud owners of about 50,000 USB-C and USB—C/Thunderbolt docks.
They are both amazing and awful. One vendors thunderbolt dock is better than the plain USB-C, another is the opposite. Minor, undocumented differences in firmware or chip revisions may have a major impact on quality. One OEM’s driver bricked laptops.
When stuff works, it’s amazing to the point that it seems impossible. Some higher end workstations are pushing 5x more IO than a (admittedly aging) midrange SAN that’s on the floor can.
The quintessential "simple USB hub": https://www.amazon.ca/UGREEN-Adapter-MacBook-Chromebook-Pixe...
Replace the USB-A ports in the above with USB-C ports, and it's what the GP poster is imagining.
But, for some reason, nobody makes that.
Even though it'd be USB-3.1 either way; even though you can plug USB-A-to-C cables into this hub, and it'd be exactly the same as plugging USB-C-to-C cables into a hypothetical USB-C-replicating hub.
Found it bouncing through https://www.amazon.com/USB-C-Gen-Hub-Adapter-7-Ports/dp/B09M...
Left hub out, googled "USB-C 4 port" to get there.
I finally went ahead & bought a decent quantity of adapters- they're tiny, cheap, and add lots of flexibility. They have helped me consolidate my cable collection significantly while retaining a bunch of charging devices I already had installed.
Once you start trying to layer in usb-pd things get much much more complex. But, as a bus for peripherals, longstanding usb hubs do more than fine.
Which is simply expensive.
On the other hand, Kingston's Nucleum is a nice hub. It provides two additional USB-C ports with PD support in one of them, provides two USB 3.0 USB-A ports, a proper card reader and an HDMI port.
I take photos and my camera produces 50MB images, and carrying them over a nice card reader which can use the full bandwidth of the card is nice, and Nucleum delivers.
For example, Anker sells a USB 3 hub and it's up to the user to make sure that whatever is plugged into it doesn't exceed 900 milliamps.
I'm thinking that a good way to go would be to get a hub that connects to a USB-C port and lets you plug in USB 2/3 devices? That way there's plenty of power for them without needing a power adapter. Plus USB 2 devices are cheaper.
Works great. You'll be stuck with USB 2.0 speeds, but it connects to, passes data to, and charges every single dumb device I have with no problems. Mice, keyboard, USB-C headphones, my phone, other laptops that charge over USB-C... and that's all I ever really wanted.
Apple's 2-USB-C-port laptop was literal insanity.
Actually... I do get the idea. 99.9% of the time I only use one of my four USB-C/TB ports, and that's for power. The other 0.1% is when I connect my Android phone for a firmware update (it's rooted, so have to go the hard way) or an SD card reader.
I'd be happy paying the $179, as long as I was sure the stupid thing did everything the port on my laptop does. And didn't require external power.
Right now, we're paying the $179, unsure if it actually does what we think (because the specs are so insane), and it's less usable. USB-C, in practice, is a giant step backwards. In theory, it's amazing, and when it works, it really is amazing, but holy crap, what a bowl of spaghetti.
As I understand if you want it to do everything your laptop port does and expect to be able to use more than one port at a time there is absolutely no way around external power. And if you can only use one port at a time it's an adapter not a hub. You're asking for the impossible.
I have four USB ports on my laptop and I need three. Unfortunately two are C and all my cables are A.
I really wouldn't mind if USB-C just went away. I've got a single device with a C plug (which came with an A to C charging cable, of course) and some other brand new charging cables won't charge it if I don't hold the cable pushed in manually. Not sure if the cables are bad or the hole. I also find it harder to plug in than micro (maybe because there's no narrow point on the plug which you can put in the middle of the hole and then move it to the edge to automatically align it perfectly) and hate the metal on metal sound/feeling this gives. The plug seems to be badly designed compared to the other USB ports (never had this issue, from A to B to mini to micro to micro B) and very often has incompatibilities where you're just guessing whether a display is going to work at all.
And then there's the ports problem. I've got a number of old cheap USB hubs laying around, like every techie I guess, but C hubs? Well... So this can now all go in the trash. We should stop this madness and come up with a better plug rather than a worse one, if we need to change all hardware anyway we might as well do it right the first time.
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Back in USB 2.0 days, a single port could consume at most 480 Mbps in bandwidth, so let's say that your typical USB 2.0 hub consumed at most 2Gbps. That's very easy to accomplish in terms of I/O [1] (1 PCIe Gen 1.0 x1 port).
Now imagine 4 USB 3.2 or eventually 4.0 full speed ports: that is 20 Gbps per port, and Thunderbolt 3 has 40 Gbps per port. That means a 4-port HUB would need to have I/O capabilities of 80 or 160 Gbps. That is even beyond PCI express 4.0 w/ 4 lanes (8GB/s). A single Thunderbolt 3 port can consume theoretically half as much as the best and fastest NVMe SSDs (around 7 GB/s).
Basically, what I am trying to say is that it is getting harder and harder to achieve with USB 3.2 (and eventually 4.0) what was easy to do with USB 2.0. Our computers are just not getting fast enough to support all these I/O speeds. That's why most PCIe extension cards only offer a single USB-C port. A standard PCIe Gen 4.0 1x port cannot even support that at top speed!.
Take a look at this card [2]: a single USB port doesn't even support 20Gbps speeds, and half the ports share the same 10Gbps bandwidth. And this card requires a PCIe 3.0 x4 port.
And this is just bandwith. In terms of power, it is pretty much the same issue, Power Delivery can consume 100W at most. That's more power than the normal draw of a typical "ultrabook" laptop (around 60-65W). Now imagine 4 of these, 400W. That's a standard desktop PC PSU requirement.
tl;dr it is just not possible to support this much I/O speed and power draw with cheap consumer technology. That's why good USB 3.2 and Thunderbolt 3 hubs cost much, much more than USB 2.0 ever did. Also why they are much more complicated devices.
[0] https://www.tripplite.com/products/usb-charging [1] https://www.crucial.com/support/articles-faq-ssd/pcie-speeds... [2] https://www.newegg.com/inateck-ku8211-red-pci-express-to-usb...
Can you push for USB-O, the round USB connector? /s
Thanks to Apple keeping iPhones on lightning connectors the only things with USB-C I have in my house is a Nintendo Switch and a Soldering Iron.
Edit: and my soldering iron!
Wireless headphones… wireless mice… so yeah all 2.4ghz transceivers basically… lossy garbage connections have me tracing down old USB 2.0 ports on my PCs still today.
Almost none of them are long enough to comfortably put a laptop on a stand and have the hub on the desk. If they would at least make the cables a bit longer it wouldn't be such a pain.
I'm pretty sure it's an issue with the USB controller, and the article convinced me more, but I still have zero clue on how to begin troubleshooting an issue like that.
Most recently, I've been using a Belkin 11-in-1 USB-C dock. I just checked, and I had it plugged into the USB 2.0 port on the dock before I moved it back to directly connected to my laptop. I've just plugged the headset back into one of the 3.0 ports, since this article says external 3.0 ports may not share like this article states.
I wonder if every other dock I've used, I've also been plugging into USB 2.0 ports that are sharing 3.0 ports...
I've tried every brand name TB3 dock. At least at the time, there were no simple "power expander" type docks, just the kind with a variety of ports. They are all buggy af. Although people do rave about the reliability of CalDigit, it's also buggy IME. I think people plug and unplug. If you leave any of these plugged in at all times, they all crash in some way.
Now with TB4, I have an Anker simple 1-up 3-down compact dock. It works great in my testing and I'm happy to use dongles as the dock isn't portable anyway. But I had to put it in the drawer for the future, since it only works in TB3 mode with Bug Sir and above, and I'm holding out with Catalina as long as possible.
Do you mean keep plugged in the laptop or keep the dock plugged into power all the time?
I have three StarTech Thunderbolt 3 docks and so far no issues. Except that the first two that I bought have a Realtek NIC (which has subpar performance on macOS). The third has an Intel I210 and I am completely happy with the dock.
Nowadays I use amphetamine and never let my laptop sleep or display sleep while on power, ever. I also now set my display to never enter energy saver mode. I don't have to gumption to go back and retest any TB3 docks with those settings though. I rather like the Anker TB4 I have now.
IIRC I found CalDigit to be the most reliable, but it too would eventually crash or otherwise become invisible to the Mac.