CES 2019: Elgato Unveils Thunderbolt 3 Pro Dock With Dual USB-C, Dual USB-A, Gigabit Ethernet, DisplayPort, and More

[mrow]

No, it says "connect a second 4K screen to the second Thunderbolt port", not a USB-C port.

Are we reading the same thing? I’m seeing it say “With the built-in DisplayPort, drive any monitor up to 4K resolution, and connect a second 4K screen to the other Thunderbolt port.“
[doublepost=1547356743][/doublepost]

True. But I still think they shouldn't have removed so many ports. I own a maxed out mid 2015 15" MBP and its ports are too convenient. Sd card port, regular usb ports and HDMI. No dongles needed or hubs. And next to those it also has two Thunderbolt 2 ports. And let's not forget MagSafe, once THE reason people wanted a MacBook over any Windows laptop.

Because it's a bit thicker, it also doesn't throttle like these newer ones do. In the end Apple sacrificed ports, battery size and performance for a thinner device which probably less than 10% of users for. They also made them more expensive, included the gimmicky Touch Bar (something also a very few asked for) and to get a few ports back, you now gotta spend more and carry the dongles. Not very convenient.

What Apple should have done is just updated the 2015 MBP body, so kept all the good ports, added usb-c, left out the Touch Bar and of course updated the internals and screen. I'm betting 99% of pro users would be happy with those choices.

I had the retina style body you’re referring to. I had a 2013 15 inch retina MacBook Pro and was perfectly happy with it. It worked great and I probably would have kept using it for another 3, 4 or 5 years. Likely until it stopped receiving macOS updates. However, in early 2018 the screen died in it. I took it in and they said it would be almost $800 to fix. It wasn’t worth spending that much to fix a 5 year old laptop IMO so I sold the otherwise working old one for a few hundred bucks on Craigslist and got a new 15 inch MacBook Pro.

I personally love the new port setup and would not go back to the way it was. On my desk I have a Thunderbolt 3 dock that allows me to connect, with a single cable, the charger, my 4K monitor, my iPad which I use as a monitor with the Duet Display app, my speakers, Ethernet, an external hard drive, and the dock’s built in SD card slot. If you ask, me that is seriously awesome.

In my laptop bag I keep a USB-C hub that has 2 USB-C ports, one of which can pass the power from a charger to the MacBook, 2 USB-A ports, SD card slots, an HDMI port, and a Ethernet port. Have you ever been on a plane or a train and trying to get work done on a laptop with a bunch of peripherals and the charger hooked up, and then need get up to use the bathroom? You’ve either got to unhook everything or finesse the cables going everywhere around you and the tray while you get up. Now I just unhook the hub and move it to the side. I love it.

I do understand the frustration some people have. But one day in the near future everything is going to use the USB-C connector and people won’t have nearly as much to complain about.

 

[manu chao]

Are we reading the same thing? I’m seeing it say “With the built-in DisplayPort, drive any monitor up to 4K resolution, and connect a second 4K screen to the other Thunderbolt port.“

Exactly, you can connect monitors only to the DP port and the (second) TB port. You cannot connect a monitor to any of the two USB-C ports (which is the post I was replying to claimed).

 

[theluggage]

Have you ever been on a plane or a train and trying to get work done on a laptop with a bunch of peripherals and the charger hooked up, and then need get up to use the bathroom?

If you need a “bunch” of peripherals hooked up to do what you need to do on a train/plane then your laptop is under-provisioned. Two cables to unplug is no great trial, and that’s been an option since the invention of the USB hub.

First buying choice with a laptop should be to identify what you need to do “on the move” and choose one that can do that without needing external boxes (that includes sufficient battery life not to need to be continually connected to power, and affordably expandable internal storage so you don’t need external drives). Unfortunately, we’ve largely lost that choice in the endless quest for “smaller, thinner and lighter” - current machines rely on a single SSD that either can’t be upgraded or costs a fortune for decent capacity, improvements in battery tech and power efficiency are used to shrink the battery rather than give longer life. Slots that allowed semi-permanent expansion, like SD and ExpressCard get dropped. Developments like the demise of optical drives mean “wooh, let’s shrink the case” rather than “hey, we could fit an internal expansion bay in here”.

Of course, human nature means “ooh, that’s so small and light” overrides practical considerations, and we then celebrate the new gizmos that (almost, and at the expense of increased complexity) solve the unnecessary problems that creates. Personally, I got over that one 20 years ago when I succumbed to a Sony Vaio 505 and then discovered that it needed twice its own weight in peripherals, dongles and spare batteries to actually be useful.

 

[toke lahti]

Releasing an expensive tb3 dock in 2019 with ethernet that is not NBaseT, is kinda lame, isn’t it?

 

[deeddawg]

Releasing an expensive tb3 dock in 2019 with ethernet tha is not NBaseT, is kinda lame, isn’t it?

Just curious - what use-cases do you personally have where gigabit ethernet is the bottleneck, and how much real-world time would you save with NBaseT?

 

[toke lahti]

Just curious - what use-cases do you personally have where gigabit ethernet is the bottleneck, and how much real-world time would you save with NBaseT?

Maybe this is out of fashion, since everybody now uses super slow cloud storage and super fast DAS storage with infinite unplug/replug between computers, but I like the idea of NAS.

 

[deeddawg]

Maybe this is out of fashion, since everybody now uses super slow cloud storage and super fast DAS storage with infinite unplug/replug between computers, but I like the idea of NAS.

Cool. Which NAS are you using that has NBaseT and what tasks are you performing where gigabit Ethernet is the bottleneck? How much real world time would you save with NBaseT?

 

[toke lahti]

Cool. Which NAS are you using that has NBaseT and what tasks are you performing where gigabit Ethernet is the bottleneck? How much real world time would you save with NBaseT?

I'm not currently even using a NAS, but would like to.
My old nas is now off-site backup.
My father records a lot tv programs and stores them on a two ~20TB Thecuses. He's save like 10-15 minutes per day with faster ethernet.
Lots of people buy tb-connected storage, "so it is quicker to use".
1GbaseT equals fw800 and you don't really have to look for people saying that firewire is sooo slow...

I can schedule my file transfers, but for me the biggest hassle is to connect all needed 10 harddrives at the same time to organise the stuff when it needs it (some disk is full and...). One big logical drive would save some time and I'd do backups, upgrades and other things more often.

 

[deeddawg]

I'm not currently even using a NAS, but would like to.
My old nas is now off-site backup.
My father records a lot tv programs and stores them on a two ~20TB Thecuses. He's save like 10-15 minutes per day with faster ethernet.
Lots of people buy tb-connected storage, "so it is quicker to use".
1GbaseT equals fw800 and you don't really have to look for people saying that firewire is sooo slow...

I can schedule my file transfers, but for me the biggest hassle is to connect all needed 10 harddrives at the same time to organise the stuff when it needs it (some disk is full and...). One big logical drive would save some time and I'd do backups, upgrades and other things more often.

Okay, so a pretty niche use case. IMHO, most folks looking for maximum performance from a RAID5 array will want the full 40Gbps TB3 capability, and not handicap themselves with 2.5Gbps or 5Gbps NbaseT.

I doubt Elgato will lose many sales from having only 1G ethernet. It's still kinda costly to implement 10G (may as well go for gold if you're going to do that) -- so that adds cost to every dock produced -- and that's a losing proposition if there aren't enough people who care about the added capability to make up for that cost.

For those who truly need higher speed wired ethernet - I'd suggest you check out the AKiTiO thunderbolt3 dock - they're apparently an OWC brand so perhaps not completely unknown. There are also TB3 10G ethernet adapters one could daisychain off a different TB3 dock if necessary. https://www.anandtech.com/show/1349...o-aquantias-10-gbe-usba-card-reader-esata-etc

 

[toke lahti]

Well, I bought NbaseT in my new macMini and I sure will use it for the next decade, if mac pro will not take my new mini's place before that.

Many people just see the number 40GBps and forget that if they have more than one device uisng that storage, they suddenly loose all the benefits of 40GBs. Very few people would even notice the difference between 10GBps usb3.1.
That being said, I guess we will soon have usb3.1-NbaseT dongles for very cheap price, so it doesn't matter if it's in your computer or dock, it's just another dongle to loose on the road.