Dock Nostalgia

For most of my career I have had company laptops issued to me, a vast majority of those have been Dell, every single one has had a physical dock connector (until my last company that is, they sent me a surface book....a damn surface book, it was the biggest piece of gargbage and the dock had issues all the time) which has never given me any issues short of a physical failure of the dock in which that has only happened to me once.

So insert the advent of the USB-C dock and the removal of physical connectors on laptops thus the death of the physical dock... I have had so many issues with USB-C docks, they just plain dont work some times or they dont charge the laptop too or they dont have have enough peripheral ports. no matter how you slice it they just suck.

For my personal machines I run a Dell E5570 with the physical dock powering three 27" monitors, The thing is a beast and honestly pretty big so I also have an E7470 (also with the dock connector) for on the go, I picked up a spare E5570 and a spare E7470 along with four spare docks on ebay for cheap incase I have any issues and need to replace something which aside from one dock failing I have not had any other issues or needed to replace or repair anything thus I plan to use these Exx70 series machines for as long as the chipset remains viable which so far they have not shown their age in terms of perfomance....yet. Once they do though and I am forced to upgrade I hope USB-C docks have gotten better or we have moved on to something better.

The moral of this ted talk is why did they get rid of phsyical docks? it cant just be bulkyness because HP had their slimdock which wasnt much more than two small holes on the bottom and the actual dock was like a 3rd the size of my E-Port Replicators I use on my Dell's and lets face it the USB-C docks are not better, most dont have more ports than the physical ones did, most dont charge your laptop too so thats two cables to the laptop instead. To me it just seems like we downgraded in all honesty and I really have not been pleased with any USB-C dock that I have used regardless of vendor. (Exception to the thunderbolt docks for mac. I have one for my macbook air and its pretty slick, never had an issue with drivers or performance and it has plenty of ports.)

So long and Thanks for all the fish!