A dock that wakes up reliably

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For a long time, my top hardware frustration was dealing with a docked laptop that wouldn't wake up. It was sporadic, but the scenario would be as follows. Even the best Thunderbolt dock at the time, the CalDigit TS3, would occasionally fail to wake up the system. It was super annoying.

When Thunderbolt 4 was announced in 2020, I was ecstatic. Intel's Thunderbolt 4 Announcement Press Deck specifically mentioned solving my very problem with a section stating: "Required PC wake from sleep when computer is connected to a Thunderbolt dock." That meant the behavior was part of the (reportedly thorough) conformance test suite.

I got the CalDigit TS4 as soon as it was released, in 2022. It was perhaps a little bit better, but overall I was disappointed to still sometimes encounter a machine that would not wake up. At this point, I had pretty much given up and filed Thunderbolt's "wake from sleep" promise in the "unreliable" folder, right next to Bluetooth Pairing.

The Unexpected Fix

Fast forward to 2025, when I needed to replace my aging BenQ and its dead pixels. I purchased an ASUS ROG Swift (PG27UCDM), mostly to see what the 240 Hz fuss was about ... and "wake up" became reliable.

Since I switched the monitor, I have never experienced a failure. The system works perfectly, flawlessly waking the laptop and bringing the desktop online in under a second.

Still a Mystery

To this day, I have no idea why it works. Maybe the old BenQ firmware was buggy. Maybe it simply took too long to wake up. I still have the same MacBook Pro 16" M1 Max and ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 9 - did they receive firmware updates?

Either way, I thought I'd share the details of my configuration, in case someone else is dealing with the same frustration.