[dylan604]

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.

[esikich]

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.

[UltraSane]

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]

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.

[jonhohle]

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.