Elgato's $300 Thunderbolt 3 Dock With Dual 4K Display Support Launches June 6

[sudo1996]

BTW, I tried a 2016 MBP again yesterday. The keyboards still feel like crap.

Yep, this is half the reason I chose to avoid them. Input seemed inconsistent unless I mashed the keys hard. Even my 2015 model has a noticeably worse keyboard than the 2012 model I used to use (which I would have kept using had it not completely died), but in a different way: It feels like the key caps themselves are cheaper quality on the 2015 model, and they jiggle like they're loose. Sad.

 

[JamesPDX]

I've got a 17" 2006 MBP that's got a great-feeling backlit keyboard. Not sure why Apple went away from that generally great case design with connectivity out the wazoo.

 

[theluggage]

So you'd need a chip that has more lanes? Or is it also MOBO design?

I was talking about thunderbolt peripherals e.g. hubs and docks. Inside a dock you've only got the 2 lanes of PCIe extracted from the thunderbolt 'in' to drive whatever USB, ethernet, sound controllers the dock contains and feed any device connected to the thunderbolt-through port. I'm not sure whether it would be technically possible to include a second TB3 controller in the dock to drive extra thunderbolt ports - but if so, it would be a thoroughly gimped TB3 port and not a sensible thing to do.

Thing is, with USB 3 giving 5Gbps (and USB 3.1gen2 10Gbps) sensible people are only going to pay the premium for Thunderbolt for peripherals that really, really need the full bandwidth of Thunderbolt - so a gimped, limited bandwidth Thunderbolt port is about as much use as a chocolate teapot.

Within a Mac, however (which obviously does have two TB3 controllers) - yeah, its partly a case of how many PCIe lanes you have: hence, the 13" MBP with its ultra-low-power processor doesn't have enough lanes to drive all 4 of its TB3 ports at full capacity - the 15" does.

The ideal "transition" MBP would have just featured a pair of TB3 ports as a drop-in replacement for the existing TB2 ports, and kept all the others. Yeah, we'd have to buy new video dongles, but at least we wouldn't need new everything dongles. Remember all those people on this site complaining that the rMBP didn't have enough thunderbolt ports? Me neither.