Dell Dock and Monitors

Hello jphughan,

Thank you for your reply.

I think I have a better understanding of how the dock works now, I believe I was over optimistic as to what a dock was capable of.

Thank you for your help.

@Hudd19  glad I was able to help.  Fyi this isn't unusual for docking stations.  The purpose of a docking station is to allow you to connect all of your peripherals to the docking station and then have a single connection from the dock to the system (previously using a proprietary connector on the side or underside of a laptop, nowadays typically with USB-C/TB3) that supports carrying power and all necessary data signals to run the peripherals attached to the dock.  Docks have never supported powering external displays (except USB-powered versions) and in fact external displays don't even support receiving power that way.  No video connectors other than USB-C can carry anything even close to the amount of power needed for an external display, and even if they DID support being powered from a dock, that would just mean the dock's power supply would have to be that much larger, and the WD19TB's 180W power supply is already quite chunky.  And then there's the reality that different displays can have vastly different power consumption levels based on size and panel technology, so how many displays of what power consumption level do you want to design your dock to support?  The higher you go, the more you drive up the cost of your dock to support all that extra power, and that extra cost delivers no value to the people who wouldn't be powering their displays that way.  And even for the people who WOULD want that capability, what have you achieved?  You've created a much more expensive dock with a much larger power supply just to spare the user having to connect 1-3 extra power cables from their display(s) to their surge protector?  Was that really a hardship worth spending all that money to avoid?

As for the possibility of USB-C displays powering a dock, USB-C displays today are only designed to provide enough power to run a typical laptop -- not a typical laptop plus its dock plus the USB peripherals attached to that dock.  And here again, even ignoring the current 100W max of the USB PD spec for a moment, the more power you want a display to be able to provide to an attached system or entire docking setup, the bigger its own power supply needs to be, which adds bulk and cost to the display.  So you have to ask whether enough people will want that particular additional capability to justify you making the display more expensive for everybody (or offering multiple variations of the same display, which brings costs and complexities of its own.)

The reason minimizing the number of cables in use makes sense for a laptop is because the expectation is that you might be docking and undocking that laptop frequently, sometimes even multiple times per day.  So in that scenario, getting to a point where you only have to use a single cable in order to connect your laptop to your entire desk setup rather than dealing with multiple cables each time you come and go can be a very nice convenience/luxury.  But docking stations themselves and the non-portable displays connected to them don't go anywhere, so reducing the number of cables you're using there doesn't have the same value proposition.