With my 16" MBP with Catalina, connecting a display to the dock or waking the display up after it’s gone to sleep causes mouse motion to repeatedly freeze up for a fraction of a second every ~2.4 seconds. The effect tends to stop after a while, thankfully. However it doesn’t matter if the mouse/trackpad is connected through the dock, connected directly to the laptop, or if it’s the built-in trackpad - they all have the same behavior. Additionally the issue is not the display freezing up since I played a view behind the cursor during the problem, and while the cursor would freeze up the video continued to play.
At the request of @Joshua_H I ran tests with different configurations. With only the display attached to the dock, and the dock attached to the laptop with nothing else attached, the problem still occurred.
I tested:
HP2159m with both an HDMI-DVI and HDMI-HDMI cable - still a problem, regardless which HDMI port was used on the dock.
NEC MultiSync LCD1960NXi with the HDMI-DVI cable - still a problem.
LG 29UM55-P with HDMI-HDMI cable - still a problem.
I’m currently waiting for a DisplayPort cable to be delivered so I can also test that interface on the dock.
Just received DisplayPort cable and conducted test with the LG 29UM55-P:
When using the HDMI or DisplayPort interface with straight HDMI-HDMI/DP-DP cables, the mouse freezing was still encountered. While it appears that the HDMI/DP ports farthest from the power cable both encounter the repeated freezing issue, the HDMI/DP ports closest to the power cable encounter the mouse freeze once per reconnection of the display and then resolves.
I will repeat the Closer-Farther port test with my HP2159m and HDMI cable to see if my other dock has the same port behavior distinction.
Just tested the HP2159m w/ HDMI-DVI cable and the dock I have at home. It in fact has the same behavior. If the dock’s HDMI port closest to the power cable is used then there’s one “freeze” after a few seconds of the cable being plugged in, and there’s no further freezes.
However using the HDMI port farthest from the power cable, that one has the freezing repeatedly for a while.
So with that said, @Joshua_H how can the issue with the farther-HDMI/DP port be resolved? I can use the closer ports for when I only have one screen plugged in. But that’s going to be a problem when I need to plug in a second screen into the dock.
Thanks for all of the testing you’ve performed and shared with us. We’ve been so far unable to replicate this issue ourselves on several Mac systems on either Catalina or Big Sur, but we’ve been getting a few more reports here and there from other customers.
We may ultimately need to consider offering you a refund since we don’t have a clear path to a resolution at this time.
For now, at the least we would recommend contacting Apple about this issue and filing a report of the behavior. The more users reporting this, the sooner we would expect to see it fixed: https://www.apple.com/feedback/macos.html
We’re trying to work with Intel and Apple to further investigate this issue, but unfortunately as mentioned above, we do not yet have a fix for this issue at the moment. It has been a tricky problem to solve as there hasn’t seemed to be any definitely pattern to the behavior. For example, we’ve yet to be able to reproduce this on our 16" MBP with Catalina or Big Sur with a plethora of different displays we’ve tested, and we’ve tested several other Mac models as well. We’re unsure at this time why only some users are being affected and not all.
You’re most welcome. At this time we do not have any newer firmware, but we are working to offer an updated firmware in the hope of possibly “working around” this issue. If/when the firmware becomes available, we will likely want to try sending a replacement dock under warranty and see if it helps.
I am currently tracking any support requests for this issue and have them set to reopen periodically so that I can update our customers to the status.
We were finally able to replicate the problem after more testing with different Mac systems and displays, but it is not yet fully understood why it is happening. We are still working with Intel and Apple and we are also exploring if any possible update can be done from our side (like firmware) but there hasn’t been any progress thus far.
I will reach out to you via email directly to provide return instructions for a refund.
Thanks for the update Josh. I will bare with the issue a bit longer, in hope that you guys can figure out a resolution ASAP. Unless you’re open to sending me a different model which doesn’t have these issues?
@aminjiwa No problem. We could offer a return for a refund or possible exchange for a different model. Please email us at support@plugable.com directly and we can discuss further options.