Anker Apex 12-in-1 Thunderbolt 4 Dock review: Meh

Price When Reviewed

$299.99

Best Prices Today: Anker Apex 12-in-1 Thunderbolt 4 Dock

The Anker Apex 12-in-1 Thunderbolt Dock appears like an excellent Thunderbolt dock out from the box, however in testing it fell considerably lacking what we expected when it comes to performance and connectivity.

To be fair, weve included the Anker Apex (also known by its model name, Anker 777) inside our set of the best Thunderbolt docks, located in part on the overview of the Anker 777 by our sister site, TechAdvisor. Weve since acquired an assessment unit for ourselves, and just arent deeply in love with its shortcomings.

Ankers Apex dock measures 7.34 x 2.89 x 1.31 inches, and 0.99 poundslight enough to set up a bag if it wasnt for the hefty charging brick that accompanies it. Its really made to lay horizontally on your own desk, although Anker sells a vertical stand for $30. Since it is, the $350 roughly MSRP is fairly high.

On first impression, this dock impresses, with the attractive, ridged chassis that implies industrial-class strength. It is a Thunderbolt 4 dock, however, and Anker doesnt even declare that its appropriate for Windows PCs with a Thunderbolt 3 port. Thats a little unusual for the reason that Thunderbolt 3 and Thunderbolt 4 are nearly identical, as our best Thunderbolt docks roundup explains. (Our test laptops both ship with Thunderbolt 4 ports.) Otherwise, you can find both upstream and downstream Thunderbolt 4 ports, one allowing you to connect to the laptopand supplying a fantastic 90W of powerand another, upstream port allowing you to connect to a Thunderbolt display or another Thunderbolt device. Thunderbolt peripherals arent common, but theyre available.

Mark Hachman / IDG

Otherwise, the dock carries a couple of undisclosed HDMI ports with the capacity of 4K60 video, based on the specifications. There arent any DisplayPort possibilities, though those could be added with a USB-C dongle linked to the Thunderbolt port. On the trunk of these devices, Anker includes four USB-A ports: two helpfully marked with a keyboard icon to designate that theyre only with the capacity of 480Mbits/s, and two 10Gbps ports which are called well. All released 4.5W for charging. Smartphones should be charged from the front-mounted USB-C port, however, which generates a hefty 20W of power, which began fast-charging our test phone.

The Anker Apex 12-in-1 Thunderbolt dock also contains gigabit ethernet, a UHS-II Sdcard reader, and a 3.5mm headphone jack. The dock is powered, needless to say, with a 120W power. Theres also a convenient power button at the front end which you can use to show off the dock you should definitely used.

In testing, though, we quickly ran into some problems. When linked to two different 4K displays using one test laptop (a Samsung Galaxy Book2 Pro 360 with two Thunderbolt ports) the dock simply wouldnt drive another display at 60Hz, surviving shutdowns, reboots, and disconnecting the dock. Nonetheless it worked properly when linked to another Thunderbolt 4 laptop, the Microsoft Surface Laptop Studio. Well, for some time, anyway.

Although laptop played back protected content on Netflix, needlessly to say, the performance on a 4K60 YouTube stream was abysmal: dropped frames everywhere, to the stage that YouTube started dropping right down to 800p-formatted content. For reasons uknown, the dock struggled with the ethernet cable inserted. Writing to an SDXC (UHS-II) card came in at 200MB/s, as opposed to the 277MB/s rated write speed. So when we tried for connecting the top Laptop Studio again to check on the review, we were left with the 60Hz/30Hz split between your two displays again, although streaming performance improved.

We are able to accept some glitchiness with a Thunderbolt dockwith a variety of cables, ports, laptops, os’s, drivers, and peripherals, theres bound to be some quirks. But what we saw didnt impress us, especially with the high price. Wed encourage one to start your Thunderbolt shopping elsewhere.

Best Prices Today: Anker Apex 12-in-1 Thunderbolt 4 Dock