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You rock up to a job with your MacBook to get some serious dual-display work done. You plug your computer into the dock on the desk, only to be given an option that's faced many Mac owners in recent years -- download and install a random driver, or live with a mirrored version of your MacBook on another display.
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Now, StarTech's "first-to-market" dual-display driverless USB4 dock is here to solve this problem … well, kinda.
Dual-display docks
The first thing to note is that the issue we're talking about is a MacOS problem (Windows users can gloat). The Mac platform lacks support for a DisplayPort protocol that Windows has had for over a decade. Called Multi-Stream Transport (MST), this protocol allows one video stream to be split and sent to multiple displays. Without MST, docks can only mirror the same image across every connected display. This is useful if you want a bigger screen, but not if you're looking for the productivity boost of a dual-display setup.
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Companies released docks that circumnavigated this limitation by using software (drivers that people had to download) to create a second "fake" display by compressing the video and pushing it over USB rather than using the GPU's native video output. This approach sounds like a great idea on the face of it, but it has several limitations.
The most immediately noticeable issue is lag, caused by the time the software requires to process the video stream. On top of that, because the software has to work overtime to create the video stream, it can sometimes take shortcuts that can introduce glitches, washed-out colors, and compression artifacts into the image.
This is a fantastic dock for under $150. Adrian Kingsley-Hughes/ZDNET
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