Very unlikely. For this sort of thing it’s always been safe to assume that Amazon or EBay are AliExpress with faster domestic shipping and better customer service - that is what the premium is buying you.

USB hubs are only one of many items that are sold rebadged or not on both Amazon and Ali.

way to narrow it down, there

Vector watch lathes are Sincere lathes but cleaned up machinist wize, and put in a fancy wood laser etched box. Basically you are paying 2-3x for packaging, and minor fine tuning.

I was once for tartifs.

I wish we could go back to products being made in certain European countries, and the USA, but that ship has sailed. (Meaning countries that paid a living wage, and offered social services to their poor. USA is sadily not even trying to help its poorest citizens.)

I still buy overpriced tooling/products on Amazon/ebay with jacked up prices because I just can't be sure on my intuition, and hate giving the Chinese my debt card. I should just buy prepaid cards, but they are another added expense, and very scammy.

(There are no laws stating Prepaid cards need to tell you how much you have left on their cards. In most cases you need to talk to a representative of the company. And yes--the amount of money consumers forget they have on their prepaid cards is staggering. (A simple fix would be a federal law stating that any money left on prepaid card is returned to buyer, or at least email them of their balance.)

If the Chinese government guaranteed they would go after any merchant that was fraudulent; I would buy most products from China.

Why? Because buying American does not seem to filter down to the employees, or in taxes. The CEO's just get richer?

It’s not cheap either but at least it’s flexible and will be useable for a long time as my needs change. I’ve been really happy with it.

I think these all in one things are always gonna cheap out on something in the end.

This one: https://plugable.com/products/tbt4-hub3c

Plugged into it is two monitors with usbc->hdmi cables (I think they use dp lanes internally) and one usb-a+ethernet hub. That's all I really need.

Thunderbolt docks (and some USB-C docks) instead will use Alternate Mode to pass-through the DisplayPort directly from the computer/laptop to the attached monitor. There is no additional graphics card or PCIe device involved in the matter, and no virtual graphics rendering that is sending frames across USB.

DisplayLink is not great, especially on macOS, even on Windows it would cause random slow downs and in general when using it with multiple monitors it would cause random tearing and other issues. It was fine for spreadsheets and the like, but for video it broke down quickly.

Whereas alternate mode just passes through your graphics card output, so there is none of that, and instead you get the full rendering power.

Though, I would always go for a Thunderbolt Dock. The extra bandwidth is nice (e.g. most Thunderbolt Docks support two 4k@60Hz screens). Also, Thunderbolt at least offers the option of using PCIe NICs, offering alternatives to the crappy Realtek USB ethernet controllers. Be cautious - even many expensive Thunderbolt hubs use USB Realtek. However, there are also models that have an Intel I210 or I225 on PCIe.

(The story changes a bit with USB4, since it can also optionally tunnel PCIe, but I wouldn't expect cheap USB-C adapters to do that.)

The key thing is to not use it in clamshell mode.

Also DisplayLink wouldn't really help much with running cooler, since its drawing a virtual frame buffer using your existing graphics card anyway, although I don't know if macOS would recognize it and switch to the discrete graphics when in use vs continuing to use the iGPU.

As for running cooler it really did change for me after buying DisplayLink docking station - before I would hear the fan noise constantly, now the laptop just stays quiet.

This one, apparently https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/189982/...

I use USB-A hubs and an A to C adapter and that is FAR FAR better on the vaunted M1 macs for external keyboard+USB.

Fancy 200 dollar hubs? Lose my basic keyboard/mouse.

USB: a dumpster fire going on 25 years now.

https://www.amazon.com/Inateck-Ports-Speed-Cable-HB2025A/dp/...

You’d hope so, but I wouldn’t be too confident. The Satechi USB-C hub that my wife got (reboxed Chinese design) claimed to support 4k@60Hz, except that it didn’t work. Afterwards we found that other people had the same issue. Satechi support provided some undocumented Realtek firmware updater for Windows that didn’t work.