From PC World: Today Microsoft launched the Surface Thunderbolt 4 Dock, noteworthy for one key absence: the Surface Connector, which has now been replaced with a standard Thunderbolt 4 interface.
Why is this important? For years, Microsoft Surface devices were driven and charged via the Surface Connector, a unique and proprietary charging port that transferred data and power to Surface devices. For Surface fans, this wasn’t a problem: like early IBM ThinkPads, the charger and its proprietary charging port served as a convenient spare through successive generations. As laptops tried out different iterations of barrel chargers, the consistency was an advantage.
However, as the USB-C hardware port and the related Thunderbolt port protocol became more common, the need for a proprietary Surface connector diminished. Virtually all Thunderbolt docks now supply power as well as the standard 40Gbps of data, which satisfies both requirements. Microsoft’s Surface Thunderbolt 4 Dock uses a 165W power brick, passing up to 96W to any connected laptops. And yes, we could see the writing on the wall—it rendered the older Surface Docks irrelevant.
One surprise, really, was that Microsoft waited on the more stringent Thunderbolt 4 spec, as opposed to debuting a Thunderbolt 3 dock, instead. Some even wondered whether Microsoft would just wait for what’s informally known as the 80Gbps Thunderbolt spec, which Intel has already shown off. We now know the answers to both questions.
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