5 reasons why I’d buy a Thunderbolt 5 dock instead of Thunderbolt 4

A dock isn’t necessarily important with a desktop PC or Mac, but it can be all-important if you own a laptop or tablet and want to use it for both work and play. I find my own laptop running out of ports even though it’s an expensive gaming rig — I can’t imagine trying to get any serious work done on an iPad Pro without buying a dock on day one. Even with a Magic Keyboard, there’s just one free USB port for something that isn’t your power supply. It makes me wonder what Apple engineers do all day if that’s considered “professional.”

The best docks these days are all based on Thunderbolt 4 or 5, since those standards deliver gobs of power and bandwidth. Thunderbolt 5 is technically superior, of course, handling 80 or even 120Gbps of data in some cases. But is it worth paying extra for? I’d argue it is at this stage, for several specific reasons.

1

Future-proofing

You never know what’s coming next

Unsplash

This should be the main reason for most people. Value-wise, a good dock tends to outlast any device it was bought with, and the best way of guaranteeing that is to choose something with the latest possible specs. A few years ago, you might’ve got away with buying a dock limited to USB 3.1 or Thunderbolt 3 — but you’d be kicking yourself today. It’s hard to predict what you’ll need in the future.

Based on how standards go, Thunderbolt 5 is new and powerful enough that I wouldn’t expect a replacement for another few years. Even then, the standard should still be worthwhile, unless perhaps you want to exploit cutting-edge graphics or storage technology that hasn’t been revealed yet. You’ll be able to upgrade to anything released in the interim, too.

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2

More power for your devices

Especially laptops

Razer

While Thunderbolt 4’s 100W power delivery is more than enough for many laptop and tablet setups, it’s not enough for all of them. The better gaming-ready laptops out there tend to consume at least 100 to 200W on their own, so there’s often no simple way to use a Thunderbolt 4 dock as the heart of a mobile workstation. Whenever I ever need to take my Razer Blade 17 on the road, its chunky power brick comes along for the ride.

The best gaming laptops can still demand too much power — but in most situations, Thunderbolt 5’s improved 240W limit should be sufficient to connect a monitor and other peripherals while only using a single power cable. Hypothetically, I could power my Blade 17 from a Thunderbolt 5 dock, as long as it was the only connected device.

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3

Multiple 4K gaming monitors

Or a single gigantic ultra-wide

Admittedly, even a single 4K, 120Hz monitor is overkill for most people at the moment, since it takes an expensive GPU to run Cyberpunk 2077 on one without AI scaling and/or sacrificing detail. But what’s extreme today could become commonplace tomorrow, and even now I’ll bet there are gamers and video professionals itching for Thunderbolt 5’s ability to handle up to three 4K monitors at 144Hz. If money were no object, I’d find a way to make use of that myself — I regularly cover live-streamed press events, and it would be sweet indeed to have the stream, my writing, and my research material flowing at silky-smooth framerates.

Let’s not forget ultra-wide monitors while I’m at it. They’re increasingly popular, as it’s a lot easier to plug in one monitor instead of two or three, and they’re the closest you’ll get to VR without buying a headset. They sometimes have unusual power and bandwidth demands, but with a Thunderbolt 5 dock, you should be covered regardless.

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4

Support for external graphics cards (eGPUs)

Boost your laptop without replacing it

Razer

eGPUs used to be a minor phenomenon, providing a way of keeping up with the latest graphics tech regardless of your PC’s form factor. Then, suddenly, the concept lost steam, owing to high-end graphics cards eclipsing Thunderbolt 4’s performance. You might still benefit from slapping an Nvidia RTX 4080 card into a Thunderbolt 4 enclosure — but you’d lose a lot of the card’s potential, never mind trying to do the same with an RTX 5080 or 5090.

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5

Working with large videos and backups

Never worry about transfer times again

Apple

This one is last on my list simply because, for the average person, Thunderbolt 4 is already blindingly fast for copying files. Assuming nothing else is transferring at the same time, you could copy a 5GB folder to an SSD in less than two seconds. Got an offline video library? A hundred 4K movies could be copied in less than 15 minutes.

Thunderbolt 5 comes into play for professional video editors and other people who work with obscenely large file transfers. At 4K resolution, some larger Final Cut projects can grow to multiple terabytes. If you’re working with 8K material, Thunderbolt 5 could be a godsend, assuming you’ve got drives fast enough to keep up.

If nothing else, it’s nice to know you can back up an entire computer in a few minutes. I remember the bad old days when USB 2.0 was the best available to me — I’d have to run backups overnight, crossing my fingers that nothing halted the process midway.

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