OWC's 14-Port Thunderbolt Dock for Mac Hits Record Low $99.99 Price ($180 Off)

[Marco Klobas]

Anyone aware of how the headphone audio would compare to the really great m1 macbook pro audio out? M1 Pro MacBook sounds way better than my Schiit DAC/headphone amp.

Here's my take about the same dock I posted this spring.

 

[svish]

Good price for a decent dock.

 

[JeffPerrin]

ehm, where? the top pic is front, the bottom is rear...

My bad - you're right! I was thinking of the 11-port model and the TB hub.

 

[rsands1]

Cannot say enough bad things about this company and this particular dock. I bought one the last time it was on sale, and had nothing but problems with it. It would constantly eject drives with no information beyond a MacOS alert saying all the drives that were connected were incorrectly removed despite not touching anything. It would happen every hour, every day. Took a peek at the support forums and I discovered (after I bought it) that this is a well-known issue. When I contacted support, they mostly just took the stance that it was my fault (despite the fact that this still happened with other Macs). When I decided to return a clearly defective unit, they wanted to charge me a restocking fee, which is just a ludicrous policy. I will never buy anything from OWC again.

Same with me. I bought this dock YEARS ago and it was the biggest piece of garbage. Constand disconnects for no reason with nothing but a mac message. If you even looked at this thing wrong something would disconnect and crash. I will never touch anything OWC makes ever again.

 

[rsands1]

I had absolutely terrible experience with the OWC Thunderbolt Hub. Same customer experience as mentioned above, just install the eject software. Did and it did not improve at which point OWC customer service just quit responding, indicating that it was something I was doing. I can only guess that their customer service folks are foreign or in downtown LA because they just don't care.

Had good luck with memory and drives, but did not have to use their customer service.

Me too. This dock is a huge pile of steaming garbage. A total waste of time and money. I switched to iVanki FusionDock Max1 and its freaking amazing. WAY better than anything OWC could make.

 

[rsands1]

Like others here, I bought this unit last time it was on sale.
Like others, I have had problems. The USB-A ports tend to disconnect randomly, making it difficult to use my external DVD drive.
The other ports seem to be solid.

Just my experience. All things said, I can't recommend this to anyone.

Everything disconnects on this crap box. OWC isn't worth it.

 

[lkrupp]

I’ve been using this since I purchased my MBP M1. It’s been flawless. I guess there are a few “Friday afternoon” units floating about…

Me too. Using it on my M1 Studio Max. Flawless, it just works. It even supports the Apple SuperDrive with a firmware patch that can be downloaded and installed by the user. My older SuperDrive works just fine.

 

[lkrupp]

Well, in defense of OWC, I had a 2019 Retina 4k iMac brick, with no solid state drive. Yeah, I'm an idiot, bought it on sale with the regular HD. Well, software updates would take TWO DAYS. That is not an exxageration.

I shipped it to OWC; had them put in a 4 TB SSD and 64 GB of RAM, and boom, new computer. Insanely good comparatively, actually usable. Running Sonoma 14.5 currently. And was that a job involving pulling off the screen. I wasn't about to go there. I have other OWC gear too, although nothing current. All worked fantastic, especially the hard drive enclosures.

I know a lot of time with docks cables are more than critical.

Oh. Major software updates now take less than an hour.

You don’t need to defend OWC at all. If their products and services were even half as bad as the claims here they would have been out of business years ago. But OWC remains the goto Apple accessories source. Remember, the internet is 95% negative and 5% positive.

 

[0423MAC]

I've only purchased a handful of things new from OWC, but I have bought several things they make used on eBay and have never had a quality issue with their stuff.

A little more expensive than you would see from no named brands on amazon? Sure, but IMO they make/sell solid products.

 

[Timpetus]

I'm not sure I understand what causes the issues that some have with this dock. Is it a software issue? Do they play nicer with AS than Intel? I never installed any software with ours, just plugged it in and it worked flawlessly from the start. I don't remember what all I routed through it, definitely a fair number of USB-A peripherals and hubs and I believe I passed our 8-bay OWC RAID and the ASD connections through the TB ports, too...