A second try UGreen Revodock Max 2131with Thunderbolt 5
After the disappointment with the Wavlink Thunderbolt Dock, I decided to give the whole thing another chance and ordered the UGreen Revodock.
Features
The UGreen Revodock Max 2131 is a Thunderbolt 5 dock, which is €100 more expensive than the Wavlink dock. However, I wanted to be future-proof, especially since my MacBook Pro also has Thunderbolt 5 ports. It certainly wouldn’t hurt.
This dock is really well-designed and almost elegant, with a power button on the front. It also has two USB ports, a USB-C port, and slots for things like an SD card and headphones.
On the back, there are four Thunderbolt ports, additional USB-C ports, and a 2.5 Gb Ethernet port.
This should make it possible to organize all the individual connections, run them all together in the dock, and ultimately have only one cable running from the dock to the MacBook Pro.
What’s significantly smaller is the power supply for this dock, especially compared to the Wavlink.
Missing Connections
What’s missing compared to the Wavlink dock are at least HDMI ports, and perhaps even DisplayPort.
This means that the monitors you want to connect must be plugged into the dock’s built-in Thunderbolt ports. In my setup, this means I need one port for downstream to the MacBook and two more for the two monitors. The fourth port can then be used for the aforementioned Thunderbolt drive. But ultimately, I don’t have any more ports or options than I had before without the dock.
I recorded a video about both docks:
The scaling works
To be fair, the scaling worked with the Ugreen dock, and the monitors worked without installing any additional drivers, unlike with the Wavlink dock.
For my monitors, I would have preferred a connection via the regular USB-C ports, or perhaps even HDMI or DisplayPort, instead of Thunderbolt.
This led me to decide that almost €300 for a dock that doesn’t offer any additional ports is too expensive, and I returned it.
Conclusion
In conclusion, I definitely won’t be buying another dock, at least not at this point, unless another manufacturer comes up with a fundamentally different design. As it stands, this dock is practically worthless because it offers no practical advantage.
ciao tuxoche
