A full year after I purchased my 16" I finally have a dock that can charge it at full speed: the Kensington SD5600T
https://www.amazon.com/Kensington14-USB-C-Thunderbolt-Dock-DisplayPort/dp/B08H4WHQ2N
After plugging it in the first time, I got a kernel panic; par for the course for breaking in a thunderbolt peripheral, it seems; but once my machine had rebooted:
I bought this one because it started shipping a few days before the TBT3-UDZ -
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B...0e388399ae79554f33897667bc7f04&language=en_US - whose port configuration is so *precisely* similar that I really wonder if it's a straight-up re-badging of the same internal hardware. Neither has a thunderbolt passthru port, both have dual-display paired HDMI/displayport outputs. The only difference that I could find is that the TBT3-UDZ claims DisplayPort 1.4 whereas the SD5600T only claims 1.2; however, given that neither one claims to be able to do better than 4k on each display, it's not clear if the higher displayport version makes any practical difference.
I have been using an 85W dock until now and I definitely had some workloads where the battery would reliably slowly drain (in particular, if I'm running an intense Steam game as well as Windows Update in a Windows VM, as well as a Python unit test suite on the host macOS simultaneously). That no longer happens. Hooray!!!
This dock absolutely does everything *I* was looking for, but it's not
quite "no compromise":
- only supports up to 4k resolution; (although one of my displays is branded as "HDR 4K" and System Information reports it as "5120 x 2880 (5K/UHD+ - Ultra High Definition Plus)" and it works fine, so I guess at least some "5k" support?
- no thunderbolt passthrough (I am guessing it's used up all its bus bandwidth on the multiple displays and 7 USB ports? I'm not a thunderbolt expert though). I found myself not caring about this because the only thunderbolt peripheral I've realistically used was an adpater for my second display, and the USB ports here are plenty fast
- there are some clicks & pops when audio starts & stops on the included microphone/headphone jack; quality when playing a continuous stream of audio is fine but it's annoying enough that I've switched back to the built-in microphone jack for when I want headphones.
- only 1GbE of networking; on a brand new device I was idly hoping for 10GbE (or at least 2.5 / 5 GbE). but, again, I don't actually have other devices to use that with at this point.
I hope this mini-review was useful to anyone considering buying one!
