The answer — one pick, priced
Get the
Anker 555 8‑in‑1
$44 under your budget
The cheapest way to add a 4K@60Hz monitor and wired Gigabit Ethernet at once — the budget hub PCWorld and Engadget both land on, from 13 sources.
Fit ledger — need → measured evidence
■ The catch — co-equal billing, always
It is a bus-powered hub, not a dock — it takes power instead of giving it, and it gives you one screen. Only the HDMI output carries video, so a second monitor is impossible at any price; the hub eats 15W of the 85W you thought was passing through to the laptop; and Anker states outright that it is not compatible with Linux.
Dealbreaker? Runner-up №2 is a self-powered dock that drives two screens ↓
■ Every product has a catch. Verdicts that hide it are how bad buys happen.
Don't buy this if…
- you only need to add one or two USB-A ports to a laptop (no display, no Ethernet)
- you need KVM switch functionality to share peripherals between two computers
- you need eGPU for gaming or GPU-accelerated workloads
- you must play HDCP-protected streaming (Netflix, Disney+, Apple TV+) on a Mac while docked
Wrong product for you is still a bad buy. These are the cases where we'd send you somewhere else.
Runners-up — if your needs differ
Adjacent verdicts — other needs, same method
Different budget, different household, different job — each of these is already researched, priced and verified. Take the one that matches your need.
Traps — this verdict avoids
Why the Anker 555 8-in-1 is right for you
It avoids every trap below — and for anyone, under $80, it is the pick because it delivers:
Your Mac's chip sets the screen count, not the dock
No dock can add a display Apple's silicon will not drive. Base M1 and M2 MacBooks output exactly one external screen; the base M3 does one with the lid open, two with it closed; base M4 and M5 finally do two either way; Pro chips do 2 (some M4/M5 Pro configs 3) and Max chips do 4. A dual-8K claim on the box describes the dock, not your laptop. Only DisplayLink software gets past the limit, and Windows and ChromeOS have no limit at all.
DisplayLink kills HDCP, and cheap DisplayLink docks vanish
A DisplayLink dock compresses the desktop on your CPU, adds roughly one to three frames of latency, and turns HDCP off across the whole Mac — Netflix, Disney+ and Apple TV+ stop playing on every screen including the built-in one. The cheap end of this market also churns: the MOKiN 13-in-1 that held this card's budget slot in July is now "Currently unavailable" with no price. Sub-$100 DisplayLink docks appear and vanish; Plugable and Kensington are where the driver and firmware support actually lives.
Port count is marketing; shared bandwidth is the spec
Count what the ports actually do. Two of the Anker 778's six USB-A ports run at 480 Mbps USB 2.0. Only three of the Kensington SD5780T's four USB-A are 10 Gbps — the fourth is a 5V/1.5A charging port. The Anker 555's USB-C port is data-only, so only its HDMI carries video and it can never drive two screens. And the Plugable UD-6950PDH reaches your laptop over plain 5 Gbps USB 3.0, not 40 Gbps. Ethernet splits the same way: 2.5GbE on the CalDigit and the Thunderbolt 5 Plugable, 1GbE on everything else here.
Provenance — 13 sources, dated
Winners are picked from the full research dossier at knowledgelib.io. Prices, stock and listings are re-verified monthly.