The TB16 works mostly fine, but it’s design is incredibly poorly thought out. There’s a single USB-C TB3 cable coming from the left side of the dock, and the cable is 16 inches long. Due to the way Dell hacked around with the design of the 130w TB3 / 40gbps cable coming out of the Dock, you cannot change the length of this cable nor reposition it, it is and always will be 16 inches long and it will always come out on the left side of the dock. 

Doesn’t seem so bad until you realize that almost all of the new 15” Dell business laptops have a single USB-C plug on the LEFT side of the laptop. So you have a 16 inch cable coming out of the left side of a dock that needs to stretch around to reach the left side of a laptop. Therefore, the cable will only reach the USB-C plug if you position the dock to the left of the laptop and stretch/wrap the cable along the back of the dock, which has the additional problem of stressing the connector that plugs into your laptop. I fully expect these connectors to fail on the laptop within a year of plugging and unplugging. Even if you had a 14” Dell laptop you’re still stressing the connector.

It is baffling how stupid this design is. Just wait until you unbox this thing and put it on your desk and go, huh, I guess there’s literally only one place I can put this on my desk and then only one way I can put my laptop near it. Go ahead and look at the picture on Dell’s website showing the dock connected to a laptop. That picture isn’t just a glossy shot to show off the hardware, it is literally the only way you can arrange your desk with this dock. I have several of these at work and all my users hate the fact that the dock has to go at exactly one place on their desk and the laptop has to go exactly next to it. 

It’s a shame because this is the only Dell docking solution being offered for their modern laptops. Used to be we could buy E series laptops and the E port replicators but Dell is moving away from that so this is what we’re stuck with.

Dell should have made the cable swappable from the left, right, or rear of the TB16 to give the users some flexibility in their desk layout.