Review on IOGEAR Thunderbolt Quantum Docking Station by David Banks

I am editing this review on 01/15/20, reducing it from 3 stars to 1. I am using a 2017 MacBook Pro with 10.14 Mojave. I'm not a fan of it. It takes forever. to connect and only works sometimes. Frequent connections and disconnections are required to make it work. It also sometimes crashes and freezes my MacBook. Perhaps this is an inherent problem with these devices. This is the only one I have and the quality is poor. I'm using it on a MacBook Pro purchased in Fall 2017. I use it with two 25" Dell Ultra Clear monitors, two hard drives, USB hub, mouse and keyboard. Pros: It's amazing that everything can be plugged into a computer with a single plug and when it works well it's my dream setup (desktop feel if you need to sit and do serious work but also a laptop, which you can take away and sit on the sofa or take away). Cons: CONNECTION - So you're sitting at your desk, plugging in your laptop and plugging it in. Sometimes the following random things happen: - The most common is that one of the two hard drives is not connected, so you have to unplug the cable, wait and plug it back in. 50% of the time, a forced reboot can occur 25% of the time if the hard drive is unplugged. ng if it happens. Sometimes simply connecting to the installer will crash and your computer will reboot. It's rare, maybe a dozen times since last fall. Sometimes both monitors won't turn on or something strange happens e.g. B. they have strange washed out colors or they don't light up at all. The release/attachment loop fixes this. AWAKENING. When your computer goes to sleep and you want to wake it up, sometimes it can wake up immediately, sometimes it takes a few minutes to wake up, sometimes it doesn't, and you need to open the laptop lid. I try to wake up by pressing keys on my keyboard like I would on a desktop. In 50% of cases, after hibernation, one or all hard drives will turn off and you will get an error message that the drive was forcibly ejected. MONITORS. When you sit and work, monitors sometimes jump or flash bright colors. Like a second out of half an hour's work. Not such a big deal, but not my favorite thing to do either. FOOD. While a single plug will charge a laptop, it's so slow it might as well not charge it. It's going up by a percentage point, maybe every 10 minutes or so. You should also close the laptop as it very slowly loses power when the third screen is turned on. That's fine as dual monitors is all the workspace I need. It doesn't appear to be unique to this particular dock, so I didn't take that into account too much in the review. Overall it comes with enough features to be usable and generally you can sit back and work easily once you've got everything set up and up and running. as long as you want. Just connecting and waking up seems to cause the most problems. The "cons" also seem to get worse as the device ages. For example, both hard drives were always plugged in, and only for the last few months one of them wasn't plugged in regularly.