this is very much a personal opinion thing but I'd prefer not to have the monitor itself be the dock. I like the idea of having single-cable to the dock and then having the dock split out displayport, 10gbe networking, etc. I thought about it, I tried the Acer X34GS, it just isn't there yet.
The monitors with USB-C charging that I've seen (eg X34GS) have really bad coil whine if you use them for charging... which is sort of like the main point here. and beyond that, it's only 89W, what happens if you want a 140W charger? what happens if you want 10gbe and the monitor doesn't have that? what happens if the thunderbolt part of the monitor is poorly implemented or has problems? thunderbolt is known for being finicky and do you want to trust monitor companies to get it right, when they can't even make a monitor that doesn't coil whine while charging?
and on the flip side... what if you want to upgrade your monitor, or it fails/breaks? or what if you want to upgrade to something better? the monitors with a good dock implementation won't necessarily be exactly what you want, and it certainly will be expensive compared to picking a dock+monitor separately.
it's very attractive in a sterile product-designer sense to have the dock built into the monitor, but dock+monitor is nearly as clean and gives you a LOT more flexibility and reliability in a practical sense. If anything I'd go the other direction and have the monitor powered off a usb-c from the dock lol.
as far as general cleanliness, one of these years I'm gonna cut a hole in my wall and drop some cables to the basement with TB3 or DP 1.4 active fiber cables (not electrical cable so fire code ignores it) and use a TB4 dock as a header for my desktop in the basement, so it will be super clean. You can even run power cables in the walls (technically you probably need this to be speaker wire to get CL2 fire rating) and eliminate all cables except for a couple running to the dock/monitor through the walls. Get a monitor arm for your desk and you can lift everything up and clean it all, etc. Would be super nice, I'm tired of cables everywhere and my desktop dumping heat in my office.
(don't do wallmount arms though... tried that and didn't have very good results because the monitor arm really works best going straight forward and doesn't give you a lot of motion laterally. With a desk-mount arm you can put it where it needs to be, with a wall arm you have to put it on a stud and you can't really move it laterally very much, so if the stud isn't exactly where you want it, you almost have to move the desk to fit the mount, didn't work well.)
I use a Gorilla Creek-based Razer Thunderbolt 4 Dock in front of the USB-C monitor, which provides the additional convenience of easily swapping out the source device (Windows laptop with Thunderbolt, Intel NUC11 with Thunderbolt, MacBook Pro M1) while keeping all other peripherals connected.
In this setup, the webcam and the USB conferencing headset connect via USB Type A at the monitor's built-in, lower-speed dock, and the keyboard, mouse and high-performance audio interface (plus occasional storage) connect at the (higher-speed) Thunderbolt dock.
> as far as general cleanliness, one of these years I'm gonna cut a hole in my wall and drop some cables to the basement with TB3 or DP 1.4 active fiber cables (not electrical cable so fire code ignores it)
Is it possible to purchase active fibre cables that are unpowered? I understood that these cable includes a pair of copper wires for power (the fire hazard) in addition to the optical link for data. And that the active components of these cables use (and hence require) that transported power.
afaik most active fiber cables require power at both ends - I know the Corning TB3 active fiber cables work like this, I believe most of the displayport cables do as well. And that's because there's not a powered pair in there.
The monitors with USB-C charging that I've seen (eg X34GS) have really bad coil whine if you use them for charging... which is sort of like the main point here. and beyond that, it's only 89W, what happens if you want a 140W charger? what happens if you want 10gbe and the monitor doesn't have that? what happens if the thunderbolt part of the monitor is poorly implemented or has problems? thunderbolt is known for being finicky and do you want to trust monitor companies to get it right, when they can't even make a monitor that doesn't coil whine while charging?
and on the flip side... what if you want to upgrade your monitor, or it fails/breaks? or what if you want to upgrade to something better? the monitors with a good dock implementation won't necessarily be exactly what you want, and it certainly will be expensive compared to picking a dock+monitor separately.
it's very attractive in a sterile product-designer sense to have the dock built into the monitor, but dock+monitor is nearly as clean and gives you a LOT more flexibility and reliability in a practical sense. If anything I'd go the other direction and have the monitor powered off a usb-c from the dock lol.
as far as general cleanliness, one of these years I'm gonna cut a hole in my wall and drop some cables to the basement with TB3 or DP 1.4 active fiber cables (not electrical cable so fire code ignores it) and use a TB4 dock as a header for my desktop in the basement, so it will be super clean. You can even run power cables in the walls (technically you probably need this to be speaker wire to get CL2 fire rating) and eliminate all cables except for a couple running to the dock/monitor through the walls. Get a monitor arm for your desk and you can lift everything up and clean it all, etc. Would be super nice, I'm tired of cables everywhere and my desktop dumping heat in my office.
(don't do wallmount arms though... tried that and didn't have very good results because the monitor arm really works best going straight forward and doesn't give you a lot of motion laterally. With a desk-mount arm you can put it where it needs to be, with a wall arm you have to put it on a stud and you can't really move it laterally very much, so if the stud isn't exactly where you want it, you almost have to move the desk to fit the mount, didn't work well.)