I have a $30 dongle connected to my MBP. It serves two purposes: It adds more ports, and it converts usb-a to usb-c. I currently have my StreamDeck, backup drive, and Scarlett audio interface connected to it, and it seems to be working just fine.
Over the years, I’ve seen many people recommend much, much more expensive options, such as those made by CalDigit, and I’m curious.
Can someone explain to me why I would choose to spend 10X as much? What am I missing? Please use the big crayons, because this is truly above my pay grade.
It’s the difference between USB-C and Thunderbolt. Thunderbolt certification is significantly more rigorous, and Thunderbolt devices thus tend to be consistently faster, more reliable, etc.
Those $30 USB-C dongles tend to be very hit-and-miss.
If you have a $30 dongle, and it does what you want, there’s no reason for you to buy a fancier device.
Out of curiosity, do you happen to know which $30 dongle you have?
But the power delivery has been hit-and-miss, and it doesn’t have quite enough ports for me - but it’s more than fine as long as the laptop is plugged into a different power source.
So I’m actively looking for one with another USB-A port or two, and more reliablity.
When your backup drive is an HDD spinning disk, the upgrade to Thunderbolt will not be worth the cost.
When your backup drive is an SSD with a USB performance setting beyond the USB performance specs of the dongle, an upgrade to a better USB dongle may be useful.
It depends what you want to connect to your computer.
I have a DellWD Thunderbolt 4 dock at my work desk.
It would allow me to connect up to 4 monitors (I connect 2), a set of speakers, various USB C and USB A peripherals. I can also connect the USB ports on my monitors up to the Dock, this allows various Light Bars, Webcams and drives to be used.
On top of all of this, it will power/charge my laptop.
When I want to walk away, I disconnect my laptop and everything connected to the Dock powers down.
I have a crappy, cheap USB “dongle” I bought years ago. It’s about 50/50 that anything I plug into it will actually work. But… I also had one device that only worked with it. I had an external drive that my M1 MacBook Pro 13" refused to recognise unless I plugged it into that cheapo dongle. After some research I believe it came down to the way power was being negotiated. The dongle, apparently, dumbly sat in the middle and refused to have anything to do with power, so the two sides ended up just working.
