7 ms·

I worked with some of the people responsible for the Surface Book, Surface docks, and specifically the Surface Book's dock. These were hardware people (EEs), no

I worked with some of the people responsible for the Surface Book, Surface docks, and specifically the Surface Book's dock. These were hardware people (EEs), not software people, and this was after their time at MS. Unfortunately I don't remember specifics (both because it's been a few years, and because I'd probably have to fuzz details anyway), but... : Docks are horrifying products. Thunderbolt docks are doubly horrifying. They ordered in every single competing dock they could find, from that era's products, and found that every last one was garbage in some way or other, usually fatally so. The Thunderbolt interface in particular, and the firmware that needed to run on that interface controller, was the source of a lot of issues. None of them were particularly intrinisc to the protocol, but the hardware available was junk and the software available was worse. They couldn't really order up a custom non-garbage IC just for a $100 accessory that sells in limited volume. (Apple, however, could and would; they'd also demand to control the whole stack. This shows.) They were very proud they got the thing working as well as they did, even though they all knew it was still pretty much trash. It was still better than the competition. Which is sad, but what can you do? (At least it wasn't the Wi-Fi chip. The Surface Book's Wi-Fi adapter was chosen by higher-ups as the same one used in the XBox, presumably for sourcing reasons. It is trash. Again, much blood, sweat, and tears were spilled making it work as well as it does.) (I also have the exact circuit for the LED that lights up on the charger cable. Apparently it was a big deal, which I find hilarious.)

whateverboat 4mo ago
> They ordered in every single competing dock they could find, from that era's products, and found that every last one was garbage in some way or other, usually fatally so. It is so hard to believe that when more than 1000 employees at my employers are also using at least one dock (Dell and Thinkpad both) and using them very well.
- mschuster91 4mo ago
  We are talking about a situation some years past. I member there were USB docks that if you had them attached to external power and ethernet, but not a laptop, they'd instant-kill the network by sending garbage frames that would cause switches to fault off. Only around 2024-ish the situation with USB and TB docks seemed to stabilize.
  - menssen 4mo ago
    I had a CalDigit TB dock -- maybe 2021-ish? -- that every time I unplugged my MacBook would take my internet offline. I thought I was insane. How is that even possible? But I finally gave up and returned it. Thanks for finally answering this mystery for me.
    - cthalupa 4mo ago
      I remember getting my first CalDigit TB dock and being excited - everyone seemed to love them. I expected it to largely Just Work. That thing Didn't Work more than it Worked, but options were slim. Eventually it fully died about 14 months in. I didn't even bother checking to see what the warranty terms were. TS3 Plus, back in 17 or 18. What a piece of shit. Sounds like it's a good thing I didn't bother trying again in the early 2020s and only recently bought a new dock.
      - phs318u 4mo ago
        Very similar story here. Went through two Caldigit TB hubs most recently a TB4. Soooo many issues. The same Ethernet issue described above, a failure to provide the rated PD power, and the TB linked monitor connection was dodgy af. A very expensive lesson. Add to this the confusing (and deceptive) jumble of TB cable standards. I have so many supposed TB3,4 and 5 rated cables I could probably circle my house. You have to hand Apple one thing and that’s the consistency of their hardware due to tight control of the stack and supply chain. You get far fewer of these sorts of issues.
      - bayesnet 4mo ago
        I have a TS3+ that broke about 18 months in. I talked to support, set up a repair, and before I could send it the dock unbroke and had worked since. Truly mysterious and left me with a sense of unease with that thing given the cost.
      - jon-wood 4mo ago
        My Caldigit TS4 dock is so close to being perfect except for my secondary monitor turning on maybe 50% of the time if I connect it to the dock via USB-C, I've given up and now have USB-C from the secondary monitor going straight to my laptop but let me be entirely clear in saying I hate that I have to do that.
- selicos 4mo ago
  In 2017 or so the standard Surface docks were rough. I think we had at least a 60% failure rate, though for the CEO who demanded a surface we swapped his issue dock with the one he had the week prior. And it would work for X weeks until failing to display to external monitors. Then we'd swap it out for the one from X weeks back and continue the cycle. Maybe change the power brick out. Today I swap the power brick on my Dell thunderbolt dock when it acts up. Given the hours of use and how many times it's been plugged/unplugged from various laptops/etc (it worked great off an AMD desktop PC with thunderbolt on the rear I/O), I think my employer should buy me a knew one out of respect.
- rtpg 4mo ago
  I think 2017 is the big thing here. We had those early "blessed by Apple" USB-C LG monitors. Garbage when it came to connectivity. Same with docks and the like. We're now 9 years later so... I think it's all better now than before.
- esikich 4mo ago
  Ask your helpdesk team what they think of docking stations.
dylan604 4mo ago
The fact they are stuck with the concept of a dock being something the computer needs to physically sit in is just funny to me. I have a "dock" for my MBP that is just a little box that everything connects to that doesn't leave my desk. When I connect my MBP to it, I just plug in the single cable to it. If the cable goes bad, it hasn't in the 3+ years of use, I would just swap out the cable.
- jonhohle 4mo ago
  I’ve been doing this for about a decade with thunderbolt 2 then 3 (and backwards compat with 4). I’ve had one cable begin to fray in all that time (a thunderbolt 4 caldigit cable). It swapped it out for an Apple cable and kept going. I’ve used OWC docks, which aren’t known to be the best, but have worked great for charging, usb, Ethernet, FireWire, display (both over daisychained thunderbolt and display port), and SD cards. The only thing I have used them for extensively is audio. My monitor is a Thunderbolt 2 monitor with USB breakout. In between it and the dock is a two drive SATA enclosure. I recently threw an extra Thunderbolt 3 dock I had on a USB-4 mini computer running Linux and it worked without any issue. I’m sure there may be things that don’t work well, but its worked for me. I even wrote an app to have a global hot key to eject all my attached disks (DriveLight). Press the key combo, wait for the eject sound, pull the cable and go.
- UltraSane 4mo ago
  There are many windows laptops that have usb-c docks that don't physically dock. They are more accurately called port replicators. My work laptop is a Dell with one.
  - kakacik 4mo ago
    Yeah parent is out of touch with 2026 reality. I sit now at work, having dell laptop connected to 'dock' via single usb cable to dell monitor. Monitor handles usb mouse, keyboard etc and power delivery. No boxes laying around, just a single cable.
- esikich 4mo ago
  I haven't seen a dock that the laptop needs to sit in in ~10 years. Afaik those kind of laptops haven't been made for that long either. It's all USB-C now.
als0 4mo ago
> It was still better than the competition Plenty of cases where Surface isn't. Microsoft like to think they can make hardware but they're no better than other OEM and it's clearly not a focus for them
- chihuahua 4mo ago
  When I worked at Microsoft (years ago), some employees had Surface laptops. They frequently had issues where the laptop just wasn't working right and required rebooting, at the start of a meeting where they wanted to connect the Surface laptop to a projector. Always the Surfaces, never the Lenovos. One of the Surface things split into two parts, the screen (containing the actual computer) and the keyboard. There was something weird about connecting and disconnecting those parts, some motorized docking/undocking mechanism, that caused problems. Then Microsoft had the episode where some of their Surface hardware would not reliably stay in sleep mode and cooked itself while being transported in a bag. At the time, Microsoft tried to excuse this by claiming that "a fundamental Computer Science problem" needed to be solved to fix this issue. Strange how other manufacturers could do this without overcoming unsolvable problems in frontier CS research. While I'm usually a die-hard Microsoft fanboi, I have concluded that their Surface line is terrible.
  - 8note 4mo ago
    the split thing got updates that juat made it unable to be removed except while the device is restarting but also, it was really easy to accidentally lock the screen while removing it, at which point youd put it back on to get the password filled in again that and if the battery got low, youd be stuck with it in the wrong configuration, so the screen would get scratched
  - alargemoose 4mo ago
    This is even more of a knock to Microsoft but the overheating during sleep issue can affect any windows laptop made in the last 5 or so years. The cause is nothing surface specific, it’s Microsoft enforcing “Modern standby” and blocking S3/S4 sleep states in windows. My best understanding is that some bug causes the system to stay awake after one of the periodic wake ups to check for updates/notifications that happen in modern standby.
jmyeet 4mo ago
Not an EE but I'll add an anecdote as a user. I went through a period of using a Macbook Pro with a dock. At the time the best option seemed to be the Caldigit TS3. It's a sleek device but luckily someone else was footing the bill because: - 3 of them failed on me. THREE; - You really learn how bad cables are. I got in the habit of ordering 2-3 at a time because experience taught me that at least 1 of them would be bad or die; - It exposed just how bad the USB-C situation was (and still is). Is this just a power cable? Or you want data too? How about an alt mode so you can do DisplayPort passthrough? Well good luck with all that. There's no cue that the cable can do any of that. And if a cable can, it's typically 3 feet or less in length, expensive and prone to failure. A lot of people don't know how complex a modern USB-C or Thunderbolt cable really is. It typically has a chip in each end of the cable. So the failure mode is not just the cable, it's the two chips as well. Bend or twist the cable too much. Gone. Damage the head of the cable. Gone. Oh and USB-C is made more complex because it can be plugged in either way. The cable and the chips at either end and the controller on either side need to be able to seamlessly handle all 4 combinations (or 2 of the cable is truly symmetric pin-wise; it might be, I'm not sure). I hope that this tech is more stable now but I honestly doubt that it is. I'm reminded of an old quote I heard (not sure from who) that said we went from a world where no cables fit but if they did, it worked, to a world where the cable always fit but nothing works. That's USB-C in a nutshell. Docks have to handle a lot of bandwidth. Even passthrough requires bandwidth. It's a nice idea but it's a hard problem.
- whynotminot 4mo ago
  I’m a little surprised to see how much trouble people in this thread have had with the Cal Digit TS3. Mine works pretty well — have used it with three Intel MacBooks in the past and now currently two different Apple Silicon MacBooks. One of the Intel MBPs did not like it. Would reboot every time I unplugged it from the dock. I blamed that MacBook for that one, since nothing else was ever a problem. I sent every crash report to Apple, along with some choice words that my $2,500 MacBook should be able to handle connecting to a very commonly owned TB Dock. Eventually they did fix it and it stopped being an issue. Has ended up one of the more reliable pieces of tech gear in my life, especially given the absolute mad complexity of TB3 behind the scenes.
8note 4mo ago
clearly they werent mechanical engineers - the dock bent my pro-3 and shattered the screen the clamp around setup was a very poor choice
Gigachad 4mo ago
I've been using the Apple USB-C multi port adapter thing since I got one free from a previous job, it seems overpriced since I can see a lot of similar ones much cheaper from competitors, but I've also never had an issue with it in any configuration on any device including non Apple ones. While I regularly see people having issues with the cheaper ones from Dell or Amazon sellers. So maybe you really are getting something extra when you pay for the Apple one.
- Forgeties79 4mo ago
  I’ve had great experiences with OWC as well though I know some people say it can be hit or miss even for the price. I’ve got two major docs from them and so far they’ve been very reliable
- Terretta 4mo ago
  > So maybe you really are getting something extra when you pay for the Apple one. Teardowns of accessories tend to show that to be true. Any similarly built product tends to cost even more thanks to Apple volume. http://www.righto.com/2015/11/macbook-charger-teardown-surprising.html http://www.righto.com/2015/11/macbook-charger-teardown-surpr... And this tiny thing proves to be labeled 40W while actually delivering 60W safely which is nuts: https://appleinsider.com/articles/25/09/17/custom-chips-and-thermal-monitoring-at-heart-of-apples-40w-dynamic-power-adapter https://appleinsider.com/articles/25/09/17/custom-chips-and-...
com2kid 4mo ago
My team (Microsoft Band) discovered the reason why the surface's keyboard sometimes wouldn't work when connected. There was a hardware bug in the cortex MCU the keyboard used involving waking from deep sleep. One of our FW engineers spent several months figuring it out and eventually reported it to the manufacturer, and to the Surface team. IIRC it was something about wake on interrupt in a specific deep sleep mode and also something around timing. It was a rather nasty bug. Firmware is full of nightmare scenarios like that.
- z3ratul163071 4mo ago
  [flagged]
  - wilted-iris 4mo ago
    Respectfully, no, not even a little bit. That’s normal everyday microcontrollers for you.
    - exmadscientist 4mo ago
      Yeah, wake from deep sleep is always one of the weirder bits. It's just hard to do.
      - deleted 4mo ago
        [deleted]
  - vitally3643 4mo ago
    You clearly have never tried to implement sleep on a microcontroller. It has nothing at all to do with ACPI. And this kind of eldritch bug is par for the course. It has nothing at all to do with Microsoft or PCs at all. Microcontroller sleep just sucks in a lot of incredibly weird ways.
    - com2kid 4mo ago
      On Band we had one of the top firmware engineers in the world who got our power situation setup and figured out that bug. We had another bug involving a single cycle timing tolerance of memory on a bus, we were one cycle off in our config. We dual sourced memory chips and one of our suppliers had chips that worked with 1 fewer wait states, the other chip didn't. Once we started blending the 2nd chip into our production line we had weird issues. One of my guys spent ~2 months thinking it was a software bug. We had a null ptr deref in our code, he went line by line and by the end of 2 months we had literally bug free calendar code. Turns out the timing bug manifested in the exact same bit being corrupted every now and then in memory, which happened to be where our pointer lived at. We figured it out when a new production build caused memory to be moved around enough that someone else's pointer was getting corrupted. :) So then the HW investigation began. The principal engineer on Band's firmware refused to allow us to have any open crash reports, all crash dumps had to be fully investigated, root caused, and fixed. In a few cases we found customers who had faulty hardware and we reached out to individuals to replace their units, and brought the broken units back to our labs to figure out what went wrong on the assembly line. (Although on occasion stuff just gets assembled wrong, even with slews of automated tests on every unit that leaves the factory floor!) That same principal engineer reviewed every single line of code that went into the Band's firmware. That code base had a consistency of code, style, and thoughtfulness that I'll likely never see again in my career.
thewebguyd 4mo ago
> Docks are horrifying products. Thunderbolt docks are doubly horrifying. I believe it. From all my years as a sysadmin, docks were by far the second largest source of headaches (after printers). Super high failure rate, all kinds of quirks, shoddy power delivery. And these weren't some cheap amazon basics dongles, I'm talking the $250+ docks from Dell, Lenovo, etc.
- whatever1 4mo ago
  Docks ok. But why printers are such a hot mess? For the past 20 years they could have been just webservers that we send REST requests to. But no, we had to install random drivers on our machines, get blue screens and have to plug and unplug the printers until they get reset properly.
  - vitally3643 4mo ago
    Because printers must be as cheap as possible and require a recurring revinue stream, which includes malware. Sorry, "valuable special offers". It costs more money to make a printer with good firmware, and you're more likely to throw away a buggy printer and buy a new one with new special ink cartridges.
  - colechristensen 4mo ago
    Printers are complex robots, require frequent supply refills, and are high touch interactions with people. (people printing things wrong, people misusing printing resources, managing quotas for same, etc.) It's not just firmware.
    - coldtea 4mo ago
      It's 100% just firmware + crappy business model. Printers are hardly "complex" - a few very standard gear/roller/sensor based mechanisms we've built for 4 decades pretty identically with hardly any innovation. Besides far more complex frequent-use devices don't have such shit problems and experience. Nor is "you're out of blue ink, you can't print this b&w document" or "you didn't install the official $50 cartridge, but a third-party $10 one, you can't print" and such crap related even remotely to printers being "complex robots" or "requiring frequent supply reffils".
basch 4mo ago
It was not better than a competing dock from Dell or Lenovo etc at the time. Wireless docks worked better.
Forgeties79 4mo ago
This is going to come across a flippant, but aren’t they Microsoft? Couldn’t they order whatever parts they wanted to spec? It’s hard to imagine that every fundamental piece is so horrifically useless as you describe, but it’s also not my world. It just seems to me if any company could, M$ could just spend their way through the problem. Grabbing everybody else’s cheap hardware and going “there’s absolutely nothing we can do“ is strange to me, but maybe I misunderstanding what you’re describing. I fully admit I am way out on a limb here so I am curious to learn more because I really don’t know much.
- exmadscientist 4mo ago
  >aren’t they Microsoft? Couldn’t they order whatever parts they wanted to spec? Economically and logistically, yes, absolutely. Would it have had positive ROI (stuff like that is expensive)? Who knows, there's a lot of factors to consider, like accessory costs, increased sales, brand goodwill, new markets, whatever. But they could do it if they wanted to. Culturally, though, this is just not how Microsoft operates. Not for boring accessories like that, anyway. (The Dock team was not where the ambitious-for-promotion people wanted to be.) It absolutely is how Apple operates, though, which is why I mentioned them. Their relative positions in the hardware ecosystem are not an accident. (However, the technical constraints at that time were severe, and it might not have been technically possible. As I said in a sibling comment, this was the era of Intel's Alpine Ridge (I think that's the right one), and it was a nightmare. I don't know that it was really feasible to do much better, on the timelines needed. Now, after that disaster of a chip was out in the market, everyone else knew what the correct solution looked like, and could build it. But Alpine Ridge had to... salt the earth?... first so we could all move on. Build one to throw it away, but ship it first and poison the market.)
  - Forgeties79 4mo ago
    Interesting, thanks for elaborating
tencentshill 4mo ago
I've always suspected Thunderbolt (and USB-C with a thick, inflexible cable attached) is a terrible port for a dock. This guy tears down and analyzes docks with incredible detail, he might like to hear about your experience https://dancharblog.wordpress.com/category/surface/ https://dancharblog.wordpress.com/category/surface/

whateverboat 4mo ago

> They ordered in every single competing dock they could find, from that era's products, and found that every last one was garbage in some way or other, usually fatally so. It is so hard to believe that when more than 1000 employees at my employers are also using at least one dock (Dell and Thinkpad both) and using them very well.

mschuster91 4mo ago
We are talking about a situation some years past. I member there were USB docks that if you had them attached to external power and ethernet, but not a laptop, they'd instant-kill the network by sending garbage frames that would cause switches to fault off. Only around 2024-ish the situation with USB and TB docks seemed to stabilize.
- menssen 4mo ago
  I had a CalDigit TB dock -- maybe 2021-ish? -- that every time I unplugged my MacBook would take my internet offline. I thought I was insane. How is that even possible? But I finally gave up and returned it. Thanks for finally answering this mystery for me.
  - cthalupa 4mo ago
    I remember getting my first CalDigit TB dock and being excited - everyone seemed to love them. I expected it to largely Just Work. That thing Didn't Work more than it Worked, but options were slim. Eventually it fully died about 14 months in. I didn't even bother checking to see what the warranty terms were. TS3 Plus, back in 17 or 18. What a piece of shit. Sounds like it's a good thing I didn't bother trying again in the early 2020s and only recently bought a new dock.
    - phs318u 4mo ago
      Very similar story here. Went through two Caldigit TB hubs most recently a TB4. Soooo many issues. The same Ethernet issue described above, a failure to provide the rated PD power, and the TB linked monitor connection was dodgy af. A very expensive lesson. Add to this the confusing (and deceptive) jumble of TB cable standards. I have so many supposed TB3,4 and 5 rated cables I could probably circle my house. You have to hand Apple one thing and that’s the consistency of their hardware due to tight control of the stack and supply chain. You get far fewer of these sorts of issues.
    - bayesnet 4mo ago
      I have a TS3+ that broke about 18 months in. I talked to support, set up a repair, and before I could send it the dock unbroke and had worked since. Truly mysterious and left me with a sense of unease with that thing given the cost.
    - jon-wood 4mo ago
      My Caldigit TS4 dock is so close to being perfect except for my secondary monitor turning on maybe 50% of the time if I connect it to the dock via USB-C, I've given up and now have USB-C from the secondary monitor going straight to my laptop but let me be entirely clear in saying I hate that I have to do that.
selicos 4mo ago
In 2017 or so the standard Surface docks were rough. I think we had at least a 60% failure rate, though for the CEO who demanded a surface we swapped his issue dock with the one he had the week prior. And it would work for X weeks until failing to display to external monitors. Then we'd swap it out for the one from X weeks back and continue the cycle. Maybe change the power brick out. Today I swap the power brick on my Dell thunderbolt dock when it acts up. Given the hours of use and how many times it's been plugged/unplugged from various laptops/etc (it worked great off an AMD desktop PC with thunderbolt on the rear I/O), I think my employer should buy me a knew one out of respect.
rtpg 4mo ago
I think 2017 is the big thing here. We had those early "blessed by Apple" USB-C LG monitors. Garbage when it came to connectivity. Same with docks and the like. We're now 9 years later so... I think it's all better now than before.
esikich 4mo ago
Ask your helpdesk team what they think of docking stations.

dylan604 4mo ago

The fact they are stuck with the concept of a dock being something the computer needs to physically sit in is just funny to me. I have a "dock" for my MBP that is just a little box that everything connects to that doesn't leave my desk. When I connect my MBP to it, I just plug in the single cable to it. If the cable goes bad, it hasn't in the 3+ years of use, I would just swap out the cable.

jonhohle 4mo ago
I’ve been doing this for about a decade with thunderbolt 2 then 3 (and backwards compat with 4). I’ve had one cable begin to fray in all that time (a thunderbolt 4 caldigit cable). It swapped it out for an Apple cable and kept going. I’ve used OWC docks, which aren’t known to be the best, but have worked great for charging, usb, Ethernet, FireWire, display (both over daisychained thunderbolt and display port), and SD cards. The only thing I have used them for extensively is audio. My monitor is a Thunderbolt 2 monitor with USB breakout. In between it and the dock is a two drive SATA enclosure. I recently threw an extra Thunderbolt 3 dock I had on a USB-4 mini computer running Linux and it worked without any issue. I’m sure there may be things that don’t work well, but its worked for me. I even wrote an app to have a global hot key to eject all my attached disks (DriveLight). Press the key combo, wait for the eject sound, pull the cable and go.
UltraSane 4mo ago
There are many windows laptops that have usb-c docks that don't physically dock. They are more accurately called port replicators. My work laptop is a Dell with one.
- kakacik 4mo ago
  Yeah parent is out of touch with 2026 reality. I sit now at work, having dell laptop connected to 'dock' via single usb cable to dell monitor. Monitor handles usb mouse, keyboard etc and power delivery. No boxes laying around, just a single cable.
esikich 4mo ago
I haven't seen a dock that the laptop needs to sit in in ~10 years. Afaik those kind of laptops haven't been made for that long either. It's all USB-C now.

als0 4mo ago

> It was still better than the competition Plenty of cases where Surface isn't. Microsoft like to think they can make hardware but they're no better than other OEM and it's clearly not a focus for them

chihuahua 4mo ago
When I worked at Microsoft (years ago), some employees had Surface laptops. They frequently had issues where the laptop just wasn't working right and required rebooting, at the start of a meeting where they wanted to connect the Surface laptop to a projector. Always the Surfaces, never the Lenovos. One of the Surface things split into two parts, the screen (containing the actual computer) and the keyboard. There was something weird about connecting and disconnecting those parts, some motorized docking/undocking mechanism, that caused problems. Then Microsoft had the episode where some of their Surface hardware would not reliably stay in sleep mode and cooked itself while being transported in a bag. At the time, Microsoft tried to excuse this by claiming that "a fundamental Computer Science problem" needed to be solved to fix this issue. Strange how other manufacturers could do this without overcoming unsolvable problems in frontier CS research. While I'm usually a die-hard Microsoft fanboi, I have concluded that their Surface line is terrible.
- 8note 4mo ago
  the split thing got updates that juat made it unable to be removed except while the device is restarting but also, it was really easy to accidentally lock the screen while removing it, at which point youd put it back on to get the password filled in again that and if the battery got low, youd be stuck with it in the wrong configuration, so the screen would get scratched
- alargemoose 4mo ago
  This is even more of a knock to Microsoft but the overheating during sleep issue can affect any windows laptop made in the last 5 or so years. The cause is nothing surface specific, it’s Microsoft enforcing “Modern standby” and blocking S3/S4 sleep states in windows. My best understanding is that some bug causes the system to stay awake after one of the periodic wake ups to check for updates/notifications that happen in modern standby.

jmyeet 4mo ago

Not an EE but I'll add an anecdote as a user. I went through a period of using a Macbook Pro with a dock. At the time the best option seemed to be the Caldigit TS3. It's a sleek device but luckily someone else was footing the bill because: - 3 of them failed on me. THREE; - You really learn how bad cables are. I got in the habit of ordering 2-3 at a time because experience taught me that at least 1 of them would be bad or die; - It exposed just how bad the USB-C situation was (and still is). Is this just a power cable? Or you want data too? How about an alt mode so you can do DisplayPort passthrough? Well good luck with all that. There's no cue that the cable can do any of that. And if a cable can, it's typically 3 feet or less in length, expensive and prone to failure. A lot of people don't know how complex a modern USB-C or Thunderbolt cable really is. It typically has a chip in each end of the cable. So the failure mode is not just the cable, it's the two chips as well. Bend or twist the cable too much. Gone. Damage the head of the cable. Gone. Oh and USB-C is made more complex because it can be plugged in either way. The cable and the chips at either end and the controller on either side need to be able to seamlessly handle all 4 combinations (or 2 of the cable is truly symmetric pin-wise; it might be, I'm not sure). I hope that this tech is more stable now but I honestly doubt that it is. I'm reminded of an old quote I heard (not sure from who) that said we went from a world where no cables fit but if they did, it worked, to a world where the cable always fit but nothing works. That's USB-C in a nutshell. Docks have to handle a lot of bandwidth. Even passthrough requires bandwidth. It's a nice idea but it's a hard problem.

whynotminot 4mo ago
I’m a little surprised to see how much trouble people in this thread have had with the Cal Digit TS3. Mine works pretty well — have used it with three Intel MacBooks in the past and now currently two different Apple Silicon MacBooks. One of the Intel MBPs did not like it. Would reboot every time I unplugged it from the dock. I blamed that MacBook for that one, since nothing else was ever a problem. I sent every crash report to Apple, along with some choice words that my $2,500 MacBook should be able to handle connecting to a very commonly owned TB Dock. Eventually they did fix it and it stopped being an issue. Has ended up one of the more reliable pieces of tech gear in my life, especially given the absolute mad complexity of TB3 behind the scenes.

8note 4mo ago

clearly they werent mechanical engineers - the dock bent my pro-3 and shattered the screen the clamp around setup was a very poor choice

Gigachad 4mo ago

I've been using the Apple USB-C multi port adapter thing since I got one free from a previous job, it seems overpriced since I can see a lot of similar ones much cheaper from competitors, but I've also never had an issue with it in any configuration on any device including non Apple ones. While I regularly see people having issues with the cheaper ones from Dell or Amazon sellers. So maybe you really are getting something extra when you pay for the Apple one.

Forgeties79 4mo ago
I’ve had great experiences with OWC as well though I know some people say it can be hit or miss even for the price. I’ve got two major docs from them and so far they’ve been very reliable
Terretta 4mo ago
> So maybe you really are getting something extra when you pay for the Apple one. Teardowns of accessories tend to show that to be true. Any similarly built product tends to cost even more thanks to Apple volume. http://www.righto.com/2015/11/macbook-charger-teardown-surprising.html http://www.righto.com/2015/11/macbook-charger-teardown-surpr... And this tiny thing proves to be labeled 40W while actually delivering 60W safely which is nuts: https://appleinsider.com/articles/25/09/17/custom-chips-and-thermal-monitoring-at-heart-of-apples-40w-dynamic-power-adapter https://appleinsider.com/articles/25/09/17/custom-chips-and-...

com2kid 4mo ago

My team (Microsoft Band) discovered the reason why the surface's keyboard sometimes wouldn't work when connected. There was a hardware bug in the cortex MCU the keyboard used involving waking from deep sleep. One of our FW engineers spent several months figuring it out and eventually reported it to the manufacturer, and to the Surface team. IIRC it was something about wake on interrupt in a specific deep sleep mode and also something around timing. It was a rather nasty bug. Firmware is full of nightmare scenarios like that.

z3ratul163071 4mo ago
[flagged]
- wilted-iris 4mo ago
  Respectfully, no, not even a little bit. That’s normal everyday microcontrollers for you.
  - exmadscientist 4mo ago
    Yeah, wake from deep sleep is always one of the weirder bits. It's just hard to do.
    - deleted 4mo ago
      [deleted]
- vitally3643 4mo ago
  You clearly have never tried to implement sleep on a microcontroller. It has nothing at all to do with ACPI. And this kind of eldritch bug is par for the course. It has nothing at all to do with Microsoft or PCs at all. Microcontroller sleep just sucks in a lot of incredibly weird ways.
  - com2kid 4mo ago
    On Band we had one of the top firmware engineers in the world who got our power situation setup and figured out that bug. We had another bug involving a single cycle timing tolerance of memory on a bus, we were one cycle off in our config. We dual sourced memory chips and one of our suppliers had chips that worked with 1 fewer wait states, the other chip didn't. Once we started blending the 2nd chip into our production line we had weird issues. One of my guys spent ~2 months thinking it was a software bug. We had a null ptr deref in our code, he went line by line and by the end of 2 months we had literally bug free calendar code. Turns out the timing bug manifested in the exact same bit being corrupted every now and then in memory, which happened to be where our pointer lived at. We figured it out when a new production build caused memory to be moved around enough that someone else's pointer was getting corrupted. :) So then the HW investigation began. The principal engineer on Band's firmware refused to allow us to have any open crash reports, all crash dumps had to be fully investigated, root caused, and fixed. In a few cases we found customers who had faulty hardware and we reached out to individuals to replace their units, and brought the broken units back to our labs to figure out what went wrong on the assembly line. (Although on occasion stuff just gets assembled wrong, even with slews of automated tests on every unit that leaves the factory floor!) That same principal engineer reviewed every single line of code that went into the Band's firmware. That code base had a consistency of code, style, and thoughtfulness that I'll likely never see again in my career.

thewebguyd 4mo ago

> Docks are horrifying products. Thunderbolt docks are doubly horrifying. I believe it. From all my years as a sysadmin, docks were by far the second largest source of headaches (after printers). Super high failure rate, all kinds of quirks, shoddy power delivery. And these weren't some cheap amazon basics dongles, I'm talking the $250+ docks from Dell, Lenovo, etc.

whatever1 4mo ago
Docks ok. But why printers are such a hot mess? For the past 20 years they could have been just webservers that we send REST requests to. But no, we had to install random drivers on our machines, get blue screens and have to plug and unplug the printers until they get reset properly.
- vitally3643 4mo ago
  Because printers must be as cheap as possible and require a recurring revinue stream, which includes malware. Sorry, "valuable special offers". It costs more money to make a printer with good firmware, and you're more likely to throw away a buggy printer and buy a new one with new special ink cartridges.
- colechristensen 4mo ago
  Printers are complex robots, require frequent supply refills, and are high touch interactions with people. (people printing things wrong, people misusing printing resources, managing quotas for same, etc.) It's not just firmware.
  - coldtea 4mo ago
    It's 100% just firmware + crappy business model. Printers are hardly "complex" - a few very standard gear/roller/sensor based mechanisms we've built for 4 decades pretty identically with hardly any innovation. Besides far more complex frequent-use devices don't have such shit problems and experience. Nor is "you're out of blue ink, you can't print this b&w document" or "you didn't install the official $50 cartridge, but a third-party $10 one, you can't print" and such crap related even remotely to printers being "complex robots" or "requiring frequent supply reffils".

basch 4mo ago

It was not better than a competing dock from Dell or Lenovo etc at the time. Wireless docks worked better.

Forgeties79 4mo ago

This is going to come across a flippant, but aren’t they Microsoft? Couldn’t they order whatever parts they wanted to spec? It’s hard to imagine that every fundamental piece is so horrifically useless as you describe, but it’s also not my world. It just seems to me if any company could, M$ could just spend their way through the problem. Grabbing everybody else’s cheap hardware and going “there’s absolutely nothing we can do“ is strange to me, but maybe I misunderstanding what you’re describing. I fully admit I am way out on a limb here so I am curious to learn more because I really don’t know much.

exmadscientist 4mo ago
>aren’t they Microsoft? Couldn’t they order whatever parts they wanted to spec? Economically and logistically, yes, absolutely. Would it have had positive ROI (stuff like that is expensive)? Who knows, there's a lot of factors to consider, like accessory costs, increased sales, brand goodwill, new markets, whatever. But they could do it if they wanted to. Culturally, though, this is just not how Microsoft operates. Not for boring accessories like that, anyway. (The Dock team was not where the ambitious-for-promotion people wanted to be.) It absolutely is how Apple operates, though, which is why I mentioned them. Their relative positions in the hardware ecosystem are not an accident. (However, the technical constraints at that time were severe, and it might not have been technically possible. As I said in a sibling comment, this was the era of Intel's Alpine Ridge (I think that's the right one), and it was a nightmare. I don't know that it was really feasible to do much better, on the timelines needed. Now, after that disaster of a chip was out in the market, everyone else knew what the correct solution looked like, and could build it. But Alpine Ridge had to... salt the earth?... first so we could all move on. Build one to throw it away, but ship it first and poison the market.)
- Forgeties79 4mo ago
  Interesting, thanks for elaborating

tencentshill 4mo ago

I've always suspected Thunderbolt (and USB-C with a thick, inflexible cable attached) is a terrible port for a dock. This guy tears down and analyzes docks with incredible detail, he might like to hear about your experience https://dancharblog.wordpress.com/category/surface/ https://dancharblog.wordpress.com/category/surface/