New laptop dock
I don’t appear to have written about it, but ages ago when my beloved 2015 MacBook Pro was running out of support, coinciding with $WORK switching away from BYOD to a company-owned laptop policy, they bought and sent me an M1-powered MacBook Pro… which subsequently did not have two display ports for my two monitors.
So I bought what was highly-recommended at the time, a Dell D6000S USB “universal” dock, which would let me hook up those two monitors, and let’s just say… this thing was the bane of my existence. DisplayLink (basically compression software to let you drive high-resolution graphics over a pipe too small to carry the full uncompressed signal) was an utter piece of shit, the software crashed all the time, it routinely forgot about the orientation of my portrait monitor, they would disconnect constantly, etc. Utterly irritating.
But I put up with it for ages until upgrade time rolled around and they sent me another machine, an M4 one this time that’s by all accounts a very nice machine. But by this time I’m sick of DisplayLink, so I ask work if I can use my budget to replace my two 1440p screens with a single 4k monitor, reasoning that maybe I can do the thing without two monitors and avoid the pain of it.
This turned out to be a bad idea - first of all, without the DisplayLink software the best that the dock can do at 4k is 30Hz… utterly intolerable. Second, the M4 Macs are really picky about display cables, so while I could plug the monitor straight into the HDMI port on the Mac, it wouldn’t work with my fancy 3-meter long HDMI 2.1 cable. It did work, with only the tiniest of issues, with the cable bundled with a Nintendo Switch, so that’s what I put up with for ages.
Anyway, $WORK’s IT folks have been on me for a while now about replacing that dock with a Thunderbolt one. Thunderbolt 4 has enough bandwidth and then some to run uncompressed video over the cable with everything else, so there’s a lot less headaches with it. I snoozed on it for about two years now, and finally after some of my remote expenses budget expired unused, I decided it was time. I bought a Lenovo 7500 Thunderbolt 5 dock, and it arrived on Thursday. I plugged it in quickly on my desk, and it just worked.
Alas, I paid for it on my credit card, and despite Lenovo’s assurances that if I did a guest checkout I’d be able to sign up later, I appear to be unable to get the invoice for it… so we’ll see how it goes getting $WORK to pay for it. I think I’m going to hit them up for a second monitor (my old ones since diposed of) so I can finally stop relying on Apple’s “mission control” to find things.
The best part though? I unplug the work Mac and plug my laptop in, and it Just Works too… I’m typing this entry up on it. So far the only issue is opening up the sound widget thing in KDE Plasma results in the dock disappearing and then coming back… not sure what’s going on there, but I’m not particularly convinced it’s the dock’s fault.
So far, I’m pretty happy with it.
Update: 2026-05-27: I bought a second monitor and some appropriate cables, which came today. For some reason, this dock simply will not light up two monitors at once on my work Mac. I originally blamed the dock, but the funny part is that if I connect it to my personal laptop, it’s perfectly happy to drive both monitors at 60Hz (it freezes up if I have them set to 144Hz), so I know it’s not the dock.
I’m running one of them with the HDMI socket on the Mac so I have two monitors again, but it’s mildly annoying. On paper this is supposed to work!
Update: 2026-05-29: Upon the advice of both $WORK’s IT team and someone on Mastodon, they said that apparently this is a MacOS software issue, created on-purpose by Apple for who knows what reason. Apple refuse to support multi-stream transport, so it just doesn’t work. The docks that do work apparently either use multiple thunderbolt cables, or they have internal USB-C adaptors instead of one adaptor with several monitors.
The solution is to buy a USB-C to HDMI cable, so I did so… another A$60 out the door and I was not really expecting it to work… but it does! Everything runs through one cable, as intended. I do wonder if my old dock would have had the bandwidth to make this work as well if I’d just bought two USB-C to HDMI cables?
Fucking infuriating though.
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