CalDigit Thunderbolt Station 4 Review: The Ultimate Thunderbolt Hub for Your Mac

Product review

- By Glenn Fleishman

Apple had a habit of being stingy with ports on its Macs for many years. The low-water mark was the 12-inch MacBook (fave.co/3GhOSKI), the first of its computers with USB-C-and it sported just a single USB-C port for power and peripherals. Later iterations of the MacBook Air at least upped the count to two USB-C ports. Apple is changing, though the company became downright baroque with the 2021 M1 Pro and M1 Max 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pro models, providing something closer to a pre-2016 range of built-in connectivity options.

But many laptop owners and some with desktop Macs still long for more ports-sometimes a lot more. If you ever felt, What I really need is a dock with 18 jacks in it that draws over 200 watts of peak power, the CalDigit Thunderbolt Station 4 (fave.co/3hRzUh3) (TS4) may answer your cry.

The TS4 has an almost absurd profusion of ports splayed across its front and back sides. Yet the choices about which ports and how many are thoughtful. It's also not so much a dock as a combination of port extender and charging station, given its power-output design for recharging mobile devices and laptops.

This is a modern Thunderbolt 4 dock, offering Thunderbolt hub support, an option for Thunderbolt 3, and required for Thunderbolt 4. To use the dock to its fullest extent, you need either a Mac with macOS Big Sur 11.4 or later installed. That can be an Intel Mac with Thunderbolt 3 or any M1-series Mac. (Big Sur's 11.1 release enabled the optional feature on Macs with Thunderbolt 3; CalDigit seems to require a later update of Big Sur.)

A PROFUSION OF PORTS

Let's start with the rundown because this dock has-as I've said-a lot of ports:

> Six USB-C jacks (three Thunderbolt 4/ USB4 and three USB 3.2 Gen 2)