The first Thunderbolt 5 dock appears to have arrived

The first Thunderbolt 5 cables arrived in July, and now it looks like we’re finally getting the first Thunderbolt 5 dock! Kensington has just announced the Intel-certified SD5000T5 EQ is now available to buy, seemingly beating every rival to the 120Gbps single-cable docking punch. (I just checked: Hyper, J5Create and OWC’s docks aren’t yet available.)

The new dock claims to support up to three 4K monitors or two 8K monitors on Windows, or dual 6K monitors on MacBook Pros with M1 Pro chips or better. It also offers up to 120Gbps speeds for connected peripherals — assuming your computer has a Thunderbolt 5 port, anyhow. Last we checked, only a single $4,500 version of the Razer Blade 18 has that port, though PCWorld points out the $3,899 Maingear ML-17 now has one as well.

But even if you don’t have Thunderbolt 5 yet, the Kensington has another trick up its ports. It’s one of the very few (maybe the only?) Thunderbolt dock to offer 140W USB-C PD charging, in case you’ve got a laptop that can use that much.

You won’t get 140 watts with a 16-inch MacBook Pro, as it only supports 140W over MagSafe, and MagSafe doesn’t transfer data — but it should give you at least 100W of power.

Technically, the USB-C PD standard now goes up to 240W, but no company has yet shipped a charger that comes close, and docks typically top out at 100W. HP and Lenovo have docks that offer 230W over a single cable, but those cables have two heads and are meant for specific workstation laptops, not standardized USB-C ones.

Thunderbolt 5 won’t truly get exciting until we can make use of all its speed — no Thunderbolt 5 storage drives have yet shipped, to my knowledge. But OWC did just open pre-orders for the Envoy Ultra, which claims 6,000MB/sec transfer speeds and a claimed release date of October 2024.

Image: OWC

Also, it would help if prices came down! The new Kensington dock will ship later this month for $400, and the OWC Envoy Ultra will cost $400 for 2TB or $600 for 4TB. It arrives “late October.”