HP Thunderbolt Dock

I just bought my third dock/hub thing. I've been on a Macbook M1 Air for the last few years and wanted multiple screens, so I got a USB 3 hub (Dell D6000) which does DisplayLink. I had almost everything hooked in there, but still connected one screen direct via usb-c. Displaylink is good for an M1 as you can add loads of screens if you want, but you can't watch streaming services on them as MacOs thinks your screen is being 'watched'. I did want a thunderbolt hub but as far as I could tell at the time Thunderbolt and Displaylink just didn't come in the same package, so I was stuck with two cables. Three years on, I picked up an M4 machine that can do two external screens natively, great, I can reach my goal of only plugging one cable into my macbook. But the Dell can't do that on a Mac because of something or other meaning it would work as mirrored-only. Time to grab an actual thunderbolt dock. I picked up an HP TB3 refurb (HP P5Q58AA) which was cheap (30 AUD) and seemed great on paper, only to find it needed a type of power adaptor I didn't have that put me back another 60 bucks, and when I got it all hooked up it didn't always work and couldn't support decent refresh rates on my monitors, with one always being stuck at 30Hz. There was a software update available, but for that you need a windows machine with a TB3 port, not something I have. So then I grabbed a Kensington SD5750T, which was another 140 bucks, but I am pleased to report that it just works and supports dual…

Is it an M1? The dock situation you have is probably to blame. I have one LG 27GL850 and an HP 24 nothing fancy. I used to use an HP thunderbolt dock to power both monitors, one output via HDMI and one via DP. Surprisingly, the HDMI output worked better. Still I had weird issues like flickering at random, limited refresh rate, etc and I had to de power the dock often. Now I have a TB4 hub, 1 TB to the laptop, 3 TB out. Not only it’s cheaper but it’s smaller, more modular and more stable. I use two TB to whatever video port you need and one TB to Ethernet. It works great. Also the M1 macs had issues outputting RGB color but I think it’s been solved in in Monterey, but if you tried any fixes before you might have to clear your settings file. I just plug in the laptop, touch the keyboard and I’m up and running. A trick to get cleartype-smooth fonts is to use betterdummy and mirror your monitors to it. It renders at 4K and the mirroring looks much better. The only problems are how complicated the setup gets with multiple monitors and that it’s limited to 60hz