Get OWC's 14-Port Mac Thunderbolt Dock for Best-Ever $99.99 Price ($180 Off)

[ikir]

Does they offer it in silver too?

 

[Bubbler328]

This model has been around a number of years and while it showed promise, I must say I have been disappointed with mine. The dock randomly ejects connected devices, and calls to (otherwise stellar) OWC support over the years has resulted in nothing more than installing a patch on my system that only sort of solved the problem. I think there are better devices out there, especially for Thunderbolt 4.

…and I have been an OWC customer since it was run out of a garage.

OWC has let me down on multiple occasions in the last 8 or so years. I've been a customer there since the mid-2000s. Used to know someone who worked there who I used to work with in retail. Was a pretty big fan of theirs.

I am no longer an OWC customer after my latest experience with their NVME Thunderbolt RAID enclosure and switch to subscription-based software service a couple of months after I bought mine.

They could have grandfathered in users who have paid for what they expected to be full software and RAID solution, and based subscriptions on new users going forward, but nope. Their support has been a joke and softRAID leaves a lot to be desired... Like the ability to quit the app without an error, which they foisted on me but have no solution for unless I subscribe.

Couple that with the fact that their $0.15 fan they got a mass order of has failed 3 times in 18 months on 2 separate units. The first fan failure came with a second issue wherein the PCB had a failure too, and they did a whole unit replacement. That lead to SoftRAID screaming about license problems which took a few days of back and forth with OWC to fix because... Since I initially purchased the product from Amazon, OWC failed to package SoftRAID licenses with whatever batch of units they'd sold through Amazon. I was apparently the first person to receive and attempt to set up SoftRAID on one of these Amazon units and it took some time to figure out and for them to issue me a license. They had to then preemptively fix it for every unit already shipped...

Their Thunderbolt cable, which came with the replacement unit, failed and was not covered despite having received a factory sealed new (non-refurb) unit after the first big failure at 6 months of ownership of the initial unit, "for my troubles". But at 14 months of total ownership OWC said I needed to buy a new cable, so there went another $30 bucks. They kept wanting to send me fans the second two times the fans failed. I say that must be a funny joke to them since they all fail in 6-7 months timeframe so far. I told them why would I want to keep putting in the same ****** fan? You chose a product in your design process that wasn't tested for long term functionality.

I finally purchased a Sunon HA60151V4-1000U-A99 which has been both quieter and so far, has lasted 1 month longer than any of the OWC supplied fans.

I'm done with them.

 

[MacGarage]

I bought this when it first came out for my 2019 MacBook Pro. I have since started using it with my Mac Studio, and I am able to use my 30-inch Apple Cinema Display with zero issues.

It's been a great dock for me, and getting it at this price years ago would have been wonderful.

 

[Neon’s Dad]

It’s too bad to hear about all of the problems that people have had with OWC’s products. Speaking for myself, i own 2 of these docks currently and both have worked flawlessly. 1 of them, I’ve had for a few years, the other one which is a newer revision (it includes a USB-C port in front) is only a month old but has worked as expected on both Mac and Windows.

I own a scatter of other OWC products - ThunderBay 8 RAID, CFE Card, CFE and SD card reader, and a very old 2.5 inch drive dock with FireWire - and everything still works. The 3rd party MacBook Pro batteries that I’ve purchased through them have also all been perfect.

Because of my personal experience with their products, i recommended them to coworkers in my department and over the years many others have purchased their various thunderbolt docks and again, no problems.

Of course, anything could break, but i personally have had great success with their products and also their customer support while troubleshooting an issue with softraid accessing the same disk while booted in macOS or windows through bootcamp.