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Level 1

60 points

OWC Thunderbolt 3 dock with MacBook Pro - totally disappointed

Hi all

I have, after a rather long wait, received my OWC Thunderbolt 3 dock. What looks and sounds great turned out to be rather frustrating in the daily use. I have numerous issues with it, as follows.

LAN port (ethernet) is not connecting after the MacBooks start or a restart. The only thing that currently helps is unplugging the LAN cable, and plug it back it. How convenient.

I have two USB drives connected to the dock. When the MacBook sleeps, I see the drives shutdown and restart roughly every three minutes. That must kill any conventional hard disk within months, I guess. There's no way to overcome this, I have tried all USB ports.

I had the external monitor (I'm using the MacBook in clamshell mode) connected via the dock's mini display port (MDP), which didn't work at all - frequent MacBook freezes, or not reacting after a sleep. So I'm using a dedicated USB-C-to-Display-Port cable to the Monitor (a Dell 2715), which works more or less. More or less means that when the MacBook is sleeping, the monitor keeps blinking up and going back to sleep every three minutes - same as the drives.

Then, I called OWC support, explaining. After waiting for 20min or so in their queue, I could talk to someone. His reply was simply that this is the way it is and that they could do nothing as everything was Apple's fault, and that they're waiting for Apple to change this and that in the software. So, totally helpful.

I had a simple LMC USB-C docking before, and had everything plugged into it, which worked absolutely flawlessly. I bought the dock because I thought it allows me to have a little more order in the cables, and speedier connections. But what I got does not allow for seamless working, just hassle.

Anyone else experiencing such issues? At this stage, I cannot recommend the OWC Thunderbolt Dock 3.

Thanks for help and comments...

Simon

MacBook Pro (13-inch, Late 2016, 4 TBT3), macOS Sierra (10.12.6)

Posted on Aug 19, 2017 12:32 AM

Best reply

simima Author

Level 1

60 points

Posted on Aug 30, 2017 12:57 AM

Oooh well. Not so hoorraayy in the end. I thought the issue to be solved, but it isn't. Everything came back, in different versions.

The symptoms are:

the ethernet (LAN) connection randomly drops during sleep, and is not recovered
the USB-drives (also connected to the dock) randomly sleep or spin up/down during sleep (they're not ejected, though)
sometimes unable to wake up the Mac - needing to force-shutdown, and restart
ethernet connection sometimes not established after a restart or new start
sometimes, the external monitor and the USB drives "loop": screen goes to sleep - drives remain on - drives go to sleep - monitor wakes up - monitor goes back to sleep - drives wake up again - when drives go to sleep, the screen wakes up again... and so on...

I fiddled around with almost everything... nothing gave me a consistent result:

I replaced the mini DP cable to the Dell 2715 by a DP-to-USB-C cable and plugged it into the dock. That resolved a flickering issue with the screen, but may have had an impact on the dock's behaviour around sleep.
cleaned up the router setting (there were some misconfigs on port forwarding, and other stuff not so optimal), now pretty much standard
fiddled around with the pmset settings. There are about as many recommendations on the sleep settings as Mac users, I think...:-o

I am absolutely clueless on what the problem is.

I had much less problems with the little USB-C dock, so it may also be related to Thunderbolt 3 and the way it is implemented on the Mac. I have a Windows computer at work, basically in the same setting (ThinkPad TB3 dock, external monitor), and that works flawlessly. Why can't Apple make it work?

Thanks for your help.

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27 replies

Oct 23, 2017 8:12 AM in response to Lypza

The first dock I received would not be recognised by my Mac despite all my attempts.

The second one worked perfectly first time.

Worked okay for about a week but now the Mini DisplayPort seems to have died.

All another ports working fine but I cannot get anything to work from the Mini DisplayPort.

I have had many OWC products but this one seems to be very questionable quality!

Robin

Oct 23, 2017 9:29 AM in response to simima

Problem Solved. Returning it to the vendor!!

It makes no sense to have a dock that has one cable for everything (which is a very good solution) but then loses all connections because I have to disconect the T3 cable to get my monitor back.

This is the first OWC product I bought but it might turn out to be my last. With my previous MBP I used a Caldigit TS2 that worked flawlessly but I never expected this new dock to work so "flaky".

rasenjop

Level 1

4 points

Dec 20, 2017 1:33 AM in response to simima

I'm also having problems with my configuration:

- MacBook Pro (15 inches, 2016)

- macOS High Sierra, 10.13.2

- Thunderbolt 3 dock connected to 27' LG UltraFine (USB-C) and 24' Led Cinema Display (Mini DisplayPort), ethernet and keyboard (usb-a)

The mac freezes after sleep most of the times. As a brute force measure, I changed the configuration to enter the sleep mode after 3h of inactivity (on Power adapter). Last night I tested to disconnect only the Mini DisplayPort and, this morning the macbook woke up without problems. I'll check again this night and see if this is reproducible. I have the impression that it has to do with the GPU, so I unchecked the "automatic graphics switching" on the Energy Saver section of the System Preferences.

I'll keep you posted.

Thanks.

ak7723

Level 1

4 points

Jan 3, 2018 2:52 AM in response to simima

I have 2017 MBP and experiencing similar issues with the TS3. After computer goes to sleep I haver trouble waking it. Either the MacBook is completely responsless, requiring me to force shut down and reboot it, or the displays dont wake up (I have 2 4K monitors connected, one via display port, one via usb-c). When the displays won't reconnect its a super frustrating as I have to firstly eject the USB hard drives from the back of the TS3, and then disconnect the TS3 from the MacBook and plug it back in to initialise the monitors again. Just as frustrating when everything is dead and I have to force shut down the MacBook.

Jan 4, 2018 2:21 AM in response to simima

I've experienced the same issues more or less on my Macbook Pro (Late, 2016).

I spent some time with OWC support and then with Apple. I especially had problems with my Macbook not waking from sleep if I connected it in clamshell mode (closed the lid and plugged in the Dock). If the lid had been closed for more than around 30 mins to 1 hour, it would completely freeze and I would have to hard reset it (power off and start again).

The funny thing is, this behaviour is also present if I don't use the OWC, but simply dock in clamshell mode with my LG UltraFine 5K screen.

I spent a lot of time with Apple support. In the end, we installed High Sierra on an external SSD and tried to reproduce it here and it seemed to have solved it. So far, I've not tried to do a re-install yet but it's on my to-do list :-)

Regarding the OWC, I still see a lot of instability on it as well. Everyone 2-3 times I dock with it (lid open on Macbook to prevent freeze), it will not be recognised (no LAN, no SD card seen, etc.). The only thing I can do to fix this is to pull the power plug on the OWC dock for a while and power it back on.

I'll try and update once I've had a chance to re-install my OS to see if a fresh install does the trick (I did an in-place upgrade from Sierra to High Sierra).

Jan 9, 2018 12:09 PM in response to simima

I stopped using the OWC T3 dock. I have connected it to a MBP 2017 and when the MBP goes to sleep or is shut off and restarted, I need to restart the dock manually by unplugging it, several times a day. I have connected an Apple Cinema display via the Apple T2 to T3 connector and with the dock it continues to black out the display (and the MBP shows as if it is still connected at a very high resolution, so you really cannot even use the MBP). When I connect the display directly with the connector to the MBP T3 port, I rarely have that issue though at it can occur maybe once a day - with the dock I find myself re-plugging the cable several times per hour, which is problematic since my Ethernet connection runs through the monitor. At this point I don't know if the Belkin dock that is sold at Apple stores is a better solution - I'm personally hesitant to keep spending money on things that might just not solve the problem. Reviewers out there that recommend these add-ons seem to not catch the real life problems end users are experiencing.

Jan 14, 2018 5:29 PM in response to simima

Add me to the list. After ordering this thing when it was first announced, and waiting over 6 months for it to be delivered, I received the OWC thunderbolt 3 dock in June and it worked well with my 2016 MacBook Pro until around November or so, when the last High Sierra update came out. After that, I suddenly had many of the problems everyone is reporting here. Spontaneous disconnects of USB and thunderbolt drives, video anomalies with an external 4K monitor, non-functioning displayport, weird Mac crashes, etc. Even if I disconnect everything from the dock except a single external USB hard drive, the drive will not stay mounted for more than a minute or two. Not good.

OWC just says it is Apple's fault and that it affects all thunderbolt docks, but I have an old Belkin Thunderbolt 1 dock and it has none of these problems.

Walter

denizlop

Level 1

5 points

Jan 18, 2018 7:01 PM in response to simima

I just added an MBP 15" Retina and OWC's Thunderbolt 3 dock. Connected a bus powered USB 3 drive, powered USB 3 drive, firewire 800 drive, and Ethernet to it and all work fine with the exception that if I disconnect and reconnect a running or sleeping Mac to it, everything returns EXCEPT the ethernet connection. Same if I restart it. I spoke with OWC support and they say it's a know issue with Apple's Thunderbolt stack and should be addressed in a future version of High Sierra. (Currently 10.3.2; January 18, 2018)

Until then there are a few workarounds:

- Use wifi instead of Ethernet

- Reboot the dock when you restart or reconnect the computer

- Disconnect and reconnect the ethernet cable after reconnecting or restarting

I can confirm that these 3 all work with my machine. They also suggested that if one connects a machine that is completely shutdown and boots it should reestablish the ethernet connection, same if one shuts down and reboots the computer rather than restarting it should reestablish the connection. I haven't tried these yet.