Your Thunderbolt Dock Is Broken. And It’s Not Your Fault.
Thunderbolt docks are advertised as a single-cable utopia, but the reality is a fragile chain of firmware handshakes and power-state negotiations. Reliable wake-up is a rare engineering triumph, not a baseline expectation. Even $400 docks fail consistently because the multi-vendor protocol stack is fundamentally unstable. Your frustration is not your fault—it’s the architecture.