Review on 💻 Lenovo ThinkPad Thunderbolt 3 Dock Gen 2 135W (40AN0135US): Dual 4K Display, HDMI, DP, USB-C, USB 3.1, Black by Michael Walker

It's hard for me to rate this dock, but I'll try to share my experience to help others who are thinking about it. Ultimately, it works for what I need, but not without issues. First my use case: I needed a dock to connect my Lenovo Thinkpad X1 Carbon (2017) and MacBook Pro (2020) to my 2 external monitors (including 4k) and keyboard, mouse and camera sharing use. The need to connect something to both Mac and PC complicated my problem. If you only have one or the other, there are probably easier and cheaper solutions. Experience: The first thing I did after connecting was to update the firmware (trust me, you can only do this from a PC). I read several reviews that talked about display issues. The firmware update was pretty easy. One thing it doesn't tell you is that after everything is done (important, don't do this until you're sure the firmware is up to date or you could screw it up!), turn it on off, wait 15 seconds and turn it on again. I had problems until I did this step. Monitors: I've read about issues on Macs getting 3 displays, so I knew I had to connect one to the front Thunderbolt input with an HDMI or DP to Thunderbolt adapter. Cheap and easy to find at Revain, so no big deal. I was able to get all three screens and arrange them however I wanted. When I connect my Macbook, it remembers the settings. So far there are no problems. PC also works with the same configuration. I have one monitor connected to the DP port on the back and another with an adapter on the front. Audio, USB peripherals: no problem, keyboard and mouse (for Windows) were easy to set up on the Macbook and work great. . The camera and other USB devices connect normally. The sound also works, everything is fine here. Power Delivery: The dock comes with a 135W power adapter and has a slot for a second (or spare) 230W adapter, sold separately. This is a proprietary connector and the second power supply adds almost 50% to the cost of the dock, so be careful if you have a high-performance laptop. I ended up with an old 65w power supply that I plugged into the second port and was then able to charge my Macbook. Not sure if this is officially supported or not, but it works. Network: I encountered an issue with my Macbook resulting in no cable connection being detected, which was resolved by restarting the dock. It can use a wired connection and delivers 850Mbps on my 1G connection. However, here I encountered a serious problem, which I will discuss later. There is a known issue that has not been resolved (as of late October 2020) where in certain situations this docking station creates a LAN storm and disables your wired network. I ran into this and didn't check everything on the Lenovo forums thread, but it was suggested that this could be due to using the front Thunderbolt port or simply plugging in a Macbook and putting it to sleep. This is not a problem during use, it is when the machine is sleeping. Other wired computers on the same network segment lose access to the Internet. It looks like it has something to do with how the dock announces the router to the connected computer, but again, I didn't do a thorough investigation. As far as I'm concerned, I can get around this by either plugging a second monitor into a different port on the laptop, or using an ethernet adapter to connect to the laptop, or simply connecting to a wireless network. But if you need a single cable solution, multiple extended monitors, and wired ethernet, be careful, you could be in trouble. Overall, it suits my needs, but not without some issues getting there and some less than ideal results. I would give some 5 stars, others 1, so I ended up in the middle. If your needs are similar to mine and you're very tech savvy, this might work, but I'm hoping there's an easier solution. If Lenovo confirms and fixes the LAN storm issue, I'll upgrade my rating to 4 stars.