I worked with some of the people responsible for the Surface Book, Surface docks, and specifically the Surface Book's dock. These were hardware people (EEs), not software people, and this was after their time at MS. Unfortunately I don't remember specifics (both because it's been a few years, and because I'd probably have to fuzz details anyway), but... :
Docks are horrifying products. Thunderbolt docks are doubly horrifying. They ordered in every single competing dock they could find, from that era's products, and found that every last one was garbage in some way or other, usually fatally so. The Thunderbolt interface in particular, and the firmware that needed to run on that interface controller, was the source of a lot of issues. None of them were particularly intrinisc to the protocol, but the hardware available was junk and the software available was worse. They couldn't really order up a custom non-garbage IC just for a $100 accessory that sells in limited volume. (Apple, however, could and would; they'd also demand to control the whole stack. This shows.)
They were very proud they got the thing working as well as they did, even though they all knew it was still pretty much trash. It was still better than the competition. Which is sad, but what can you do?
(At least it wasn't the Wi-Fi chip. The Surface Book's Wi-Fi adapter was chosen by higher-ups as the same one used in the XBox, presumably for sourcing reasons. It is trash. Again, much blood, sweat, and tears were spilled making it work as well as it does.)
(I also have the exact circuit for the LED that lights up on the charger cable. Apparently it was a big deal, which I find hilarious.)
My team (Microsoft Band) discovered the reason why the surface's keyboard sometimes wouldn't work when connected. There was a hardware bug in the cortex MCU the keyboard used involving waking from deep sleep. One of our FW engineers spent several months figuring it out and eventually reported it to the manufacturer, and to the Surface team. IIRC it was something about wake on interrupt in a specific deep sleep mode and also something around timing.
It was a rather nasty bug. Firmware is full of nightmare scenarios like that.
ah the enshitification of the pc. we are well into it. M$ started it with the "Modern Standby" / s2-idle terrible idea.
Respectfully, no, not even a little bit. That’s normal everyday microcontrollers for you.
You clearly have never tried to implement sleep on a microcontroller. It has nothing at all to do with ACPI. And this kind of eldritch bug is par for the course. It has nothing at all to do with Microsoft or PCs at all. Microcontroller sleep just sucks in a lot of incredibly weird ways.
I've been using the Apple USB-C multi port adapter thing since I got one free from a previous job, it seems overpriced since I can see a lot of similar ones much cheaper from competitors, but I've also never had an issue with it in any configuration on any device including non Apple ones. While I regularly see people having issues with the cheaper ones from Dell or Amazon sellers. So maybe you really are getting something extra when you pay for the Apple one.
> Docks are horrifying products. Thunderbolt docks are doubly horrifying.
I believe it. From all my years as a sysadmin, docks were by far the second largest source of headaches (after printers). Super high failure rate, all kinds of quirks, shoddy power delivery. And these weren't some cheap amazon basics dongles, I'm talking the $250+ docks from Dell, Lenovo, etc.
Docks ok. But why printers are such a hot mess? For the past 20 years they could have been just webservers that we send REST requests to.
But no, we had to install random drivers on our machines, get blue screens and have to plug and unplug the printers until they get reset properly.
Because printers must be as cheap as possible and require a recurring revinue stream, which includes malware. Sorry, "valuable special offers".
It costs more money to make a printer with good firmware, and you're more likely to throw away a buggy printer and buy a new one with new special ink cartridges.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> They ordered in every single competing dock they could find, from that era's products, and found that every last one was garbage in some way or other, usually fatally so.
It is so hard to believe that when more than 1000 employees at my employers are also using at least one dock (Dell and Thinkpad both) and using them very well.
In 2017 or so the standard Surface docks were rough. I think we had at least a 60% failure rate, though for the CEO who demanded a surface we swapped his issue dock with the one he had the week prior. And it would work for X weeks until failing to display to external monitors. Then we'd swap it out for the one from X weeks back and continue the cycle. Maybe change the power brick out.
Today I swap the power brick on my Dell thunderbolt dock when it acts up. Given the hours of use and how many times it's been plugged/unplugged from various laptops/etc (it worked great off an AMD desktop PC with thunderbolt on the rear I/O), I think my employer should buy me a knew one out of respect.
I think 2017 is the big thing here.
We had those early "blessed by Apple" USB-C LG monitors. Garbage when it came to connectivity. Same with docks and the like.
We're now 9 years later so... I think it's all better now than before.
Ask your helpdesk team what they think of docking stations.
We are talking about a situation some years past. I member there were USB docks that if you had them attached to external power and ethernet, but not a laptop, they'd instant-kill the network by sending garbage frames that would cause switches to fault off.
Only around 2024-ish the situation with USB and TB docks seemed to stabilize.
Yes!! The Dell WD19 was notorious for that. My wife’s company used those - we couldn’t leave her WFH dock connected to our home network because of the wild broadcast storms causing our core switch to stop processing frames from her home office desktop switch. My org used HP Dock G5 units which behaved much better (besides the occasional firmware update killing video output until a power cycle, and inconsistent MAC address pass through between hardware revisions).
I had a CalDigit TB dock -- maybe 2021-ish? -- that every time I unplugged my MacBook would take my internet offline. I thought I was insane. How is that even possible? But I finally gave up and returned it.
Thanks for finally answering this mystery for me.
I have a brand new TV where if I plug the HDMI into my M4 MBP, MacOS ceases to have any functioning WiFi capability. Unplug the HDMI and internet returns instantly.
That's probably because your TV has support for Ethernet over HDMI enabled. Run ifconfig to check if there's a new (and, possibly, default-routed) interface when you plug that TV in.
I remember getting my first CalDigit TB dock and being excited - everyone seemed to love them. I expected it to largely Just Work.
That thing Didn't Work more than it Worked, but options were slim. Eventually it fully died about 14 months in. I didn't even bother checking to see what the warranty terms were. TS3 Plus, back in 17 or 18. What a piece of shit.
Sounds like it's a good thing I didn't bother trying again in the early 2020s and only recently bought a new dock.
I have a TS3+ that broke about 18 months in. I talked to support, set up a repair, and before I could send it the dock unbroke and had worked since. Truly mysterious and left me with a sense of unease with that thing given the cost.
Very similar story here. Went through two Caldigit TB hubs most recently a TB4. Soooo many issues. The same Ethernet issue described above, a failure to provide the rated PD power, and the TB linked monitor connection was dodgy af. A very expensive lesson. Add to this the confusing (and deceptive) jumble of TB cable standards. I have so many supposed TB3,4 and 5 rated cables I could probably circle my house. You have to hand Apple one thing and that’s the consistency of their hardware due to tight control of the stack and supply chain. You get far fewer of these sorts of issues.
Ayup, it was a topic on HN at least twice: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31268134 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12339902
Yes, this would have been around 2015. (When I said "Surface Book" I meant the original!)
Docks were bad, bad products in those days. They were no longer the dedicated bulky-but-reliable things of years past, or the modern finally-debugged dongles we've got now.
This was Intel's Alpine Ridge and it was hell. (At least, I think that was the one. Certainly, it was hell!)
> It was still better than the competition
Plenty of cases where Surface isn't. Microsoft like to think they can make hardware but they're no better than other OEM and it's clearly not a focus for them
When I worked at Microsoft (years ago), some employees had Surface laptops. They frequently had issues where the laptop just wasn't working right and required rebooting, at the start of a meeting where they wanted to connect the Surface laptop to a projector. Always the Surfaces, never the Lenovos. One of the Surface things split into two parts, the screen (containing the actual computer) and the keyboard. There was something weird about connecting and disconnecting those parts, some motorized docking/undocking mechanism, that caused problems.
Then Microsoft had the episode where some of their Surface hardware would not reliably stay in sleep mode and cooked itself while being transported in a bag. At the time, Microsoft tried to excuse this by claiming that "a fundamental Computer Science problem" needed to be solved to fix this issue. Strange how other manufacturers could do this without overcoming unsolvable problems in frontier CS research.
While I'm usually a die-hard Microsoft fanboi, I have concluded that their Surface line is terrible.
This is even more of a knock to Microsoft but the overheating during sleep issue can affect any windows laptop made in the last 5 or so years. The cause is nothing surface specific, it’s Microsoft enforcing “Modern standby” and blocking S3/S4 sleep states in windows. My best understanding is that some bug causes the system to stay awake after one of the periodic wake ups to check for updates/notifications that happen in modern standby.
My work laptop just started doing this 3 weeks ago! It's insane. Rather new machine too.
It gets so hot in my bag I actually worry about it starting a fire one day. I now take it out every night.
Obviously I tried googling but no dice. Nothing changed, settings seem in order, no idea what to do.
Windows 8.1 and a Surface Pro 2, touch first with the start screen completely replacing the desktop outside storing files, was fantastic. It felt new and functional in the world of ungainly non Apple tablets, could do everything a regular laptop could, and boast solid touch support and features. It was a phenomenal device for me in college for notes given I had my own wireless keyboard for long typing sessions. Given the rush for digital text books, PDF or terrible, its form factor and flexibility made sense.
But I completely understand why it didn't meet market expectations and the 8/8.1 UI fell off a cliff. If you weren't willing tyo overhaul how you interacted with a Windows device and use it as designed, or needed something that was better at any given feature the surface tablet presented, it was not the right option.
I would love an option for the 8.1 style start screen on Windows 11, at least for a touch screen laptop. It really worked for me and how I used a computer at that point in time. I have an 8.1 install iso hanging around in case it comes up.
the split thing got updates that juat made it unable to be removed except while the device is restarting
but also, it was really easy to accidentally lock the screen while removing it, at which point youd put it back on to get the password filled in again
that and if the battery got low, youd be stuck with it in the wrong configuration, so the screen would get scratched
Microsoft has built some good hardware over the years. The problem with this is that it runs windows. The hardware is probably nice.
It was not better than a competing dock from Dell or Lenovo etc at the time. Wireless docks worked better.
clearly they werent mechanical engineers - the dock bent my pro-3 and shattered the screen
the clamp around setup was a very poor choice
Not an EE but I'll add an anecdote as a user.
I went through a period of using a Macbook Pro with a dock. At the time the best option seemed to be the Caldigit TS3. It's a sleek device but luckily someone else was footing the bill because:
- 3 of them failed on me. THREE;
- You really learn how bad cables are. I got in the habit of ordering 2-3 at a time because experience taught me that at least 1 of them would be bad or die;
- It exposed just how bad the USB-C situation was (and still is). Is this just a power cable? Or you want data too? How about an alt mode so you can do DisplayPort passthrough? Well good luck with all that. There's no cue that the cable can do any of that. And if a cable can, it's typically 3 feet or less in length, expensive and prone to failure.
A lot of people don't know how complex a modern USB-C or Thunderbolt cable really is. It typically has a chip in each end of the cable. So the failure mode is not just the cable, it's the two chips as well. Bend or twist the cable too much. Gone. Damage the head of the cable. Gone.
Oh and USB-C is made more complex because it can be plugged in either way. The cable and the chips at either end and the controller on either side need to be able to seamlessly handle all 4 combinations (or 2 of the cable is truly symmetric pin-wise; it might be, I'm not sure).
I hope that this tech is more stable now but I honestly doubt that it is.
I'm reminded of an old quote I heard (not sure from who) that said we went from a world where no cables fit but if they did, it worked, to a world where the cable always fit but nothing works. That's USB-C in a nutshell.
Docks have to handle a lot of bandwidth. Even passthrough requires bandwidth. It's a nice idea but it's a hard problem.
I’m a little surprised to see how much trouble people in this thread have had with the Cal Digit TS3.
Mine works pretty well — have used it with three Intel MacBooks in the past and now currently two different Apple Silicon MacBooks.
One of the Intel MBPs did not like it. Would reboot every time I unplugged it from the dock. I blamed that MacBook for that one, since nothing else was ever a problem. I sent every crash report to Apple, along with some choice words that my $2,500 MacBook should be able to handle connecting to a very commonly owned TB Dock. Eventually they did fix it and it stopped being an issue.
Has ended up one of the more reliable pieces of tech gear in my life, especially given the absolute mad complexity of TB3 behind the scenes.
Yeah, I've had 3 CalDigit docks (USB-C Dock, TS4 and Element 5) and they've all been bulletproof.
I will note that mine have all functioned as docks for effectively-stationary PCs, so there's basically zero cable wear happening.