Tong Family

Well, I’ve been experimenting with quite a few USB C adapters. And this is the first one that started to burn up. It is $25 from Geddie that is USB C to USB A, it has a USB C input for power, and HDMI input. It worked fine when I plugged it in the first time. Then suddenly the display went out and I had that familiar electronics are burning inside the adapter smell. The main thing you want in a dongle of this type is real 60Hz for 4K displays if only for future proofing.

I threw it away before my MacBook caught on fire or burned out the USB port.

Also as an aside, I was using an old Saatchi USB C adapter and I was replacing it because I noticed in About Mac > System Report, that power reported was 55W and not 87W. I think these things have a power limit.

So I’m now using another no-name adapter from Lionwei, it doesn’t pass USB C power and just has HDMI, flash adapters and three USB A ports, so hopefully this will work.

You’ve been warned, on the other hand, the really expensive Cal Digit TS3+ seem to work flawlessly at $220 or so. So I guess if that if you really don’t want any trouble for a docking station at home, then you need pay up. The only real issue with them is that they only have a DisplayPort adapter, so you need an Active HDMI to DisplayPort or HDMI to USB C to make them work.

Of course if you do now, you probably want to future proof and get the new Thunderbolt 4 stations, these are smaller, have 40Gbps instead of 20Gbps from Thunderbolt 3.