It's really only complex when you are trying to use the newest/most demanding features. The average person is just charging accessories and maybe plugging their laptop in to the monitor with the cable it came with.
And for docks you just buy the one that your laptop OEM sells and it all just works. If you have a macbook, just buy the apple adapter and you know it will work. Yes it's a bit expensive, but all the cheaper ones on ebay and amazon are defective.
> If you have a macbook, just buy the apple adapter and you know it will work.
This was very much NOT true for the x86 Macbooks. There is a gigantic thread on the Apple forums about it. I have 6 different docks of both TB3 and TB4 generations and none of them work on my x86 Macbook pro while they all work with my Windows and Linux machines. This was so bad that it pushed me to Linux full-time.
Has this gotten better on the M1/M2's?
Although, I'm not really looking to move back at this point. Going Linux full-time has been quite refreshing for me. I no longer have to buy apps to dork with everything that Apple refused to put useful defaults on.
Both CalDigit and Belkin each used to have two different TB3 docks on the Apple store (I see that is no longer true). I believe that Anker used to be sold for a while but is no more. There used to be a TB4 dock, but I don't remember which brand as it was expensive enough that we returned it when it didn't work.
I have the adapter you pointed out and it also fails.
In addition, I KNOW FOR A FACT that this broke with an OS upgrade because I have a precisely identical laptop that runs an earlier version of macOS and the dock works fine. And if I swap the drives, the failure follows the OS.
> Has always worked for me on Intel and Apple chips and have seen it always work for every other mac user.
That’s surprising. I used both a “Satechi” hub, and a Dell dock at work when I had my last x86 MBP and both worked fine for an external monitor and devices. Did you have some particular need re. thunderbolt or something?
And for docks you just buy the one that your laptop OEM sells and it all just works. If you have a macbook, just buy the apple adapter and you know it will work. Yes it's a bit expensive, but all the cheaper ones on ebay and amazon are defective.