USB-C docking and Yoga 900 support

  1. I see extensive Pluggable attention to inconsistent Dell notebook USB-C issues, but for the Yoga 900, I see is that you confirm there have also have been inconsistent results with UD-CA1/UD-ULTCDL so you respond by removing the Yoga completely from the list of supported PC’s! Why not the same attention to addressing any Yoga issues???

  2. The Yoga 900 does not support power over USB-C, but I was wondering if it were possible to provide a USB-C host adapter/splitter to provide 20v/60Watt power to the Yoga? While this would require connecting 2 cables instead of 1, it does avoid having to use an extra power brick for the Yoga which would be very nice.

  3. What is the latest word on availability of the UD-ULTCDL? Amazon just says “we don’t know when it will be available”. That’s sure not helpful.

Hello,

  1. I understand your concern about the Lenovo Yoga 900. We bought a Yoga 900 to test with our different USB-C accessories and docking stations and the results have been very poor. Some customers have reported their Yoga works fine with our products, others reported their Yoga does not work well with our products at all. To avoid selling something to customers that may not work with their Yoga, it was best for us to set expectations that it just will not work, which has been the case most of the time.

Also Lenovo has not been actively updating their system BIOS or trying to resolve the issue from their side. Dell has been very active in trying to make sure their systems are compatible with many USB-C solutions and Dell has a much larger market share so it has made sense to focus there. Nearly 2/3rds of our customers buying USB-C docking stations are using a Dell system of some kind (XPS, Precision, Inspiron).

  1. This is not possible. Not without a lot of engineering.

  2. We hope to have units later this month, but unfortunately it will not work with your Yoga 900 from the testing we have done.

Thanks and sorry!

Hey Josh - thanks for the super prompt reply!

That’s very disappointing that Lenovo hasn’t been responsive - especially since they don’t offer any Type-C docking solutions at all.

I have a new Kensington SD1500 USB-C mobile docking unit that also did not work reliably with a 2nd HD monitor attached via HDMI. After waking up from sleep, the monitor would often stay dark and I would have to reboot to get it working again.

I found that updating to the latest IBM Graphics HD driver seems to have fixed this HDMI issue! Have you done the same? Everything else works perfectly on the SD1500 - 1G Ethernet, VGA, USB3, so I would have expected the same with Plugable.

I’m looking for an additional “permanent” docking station, not a small limited feature mobile one that I use for travel, and was hoping to go with Plugable. Let me know if you need any additional testing help.

It is disappointing, though it’s not only Lenovo, most manufactures are not keeping on top of it.

We did update the Intel HD graphics drivers with little success.

If Lenovo updates their BIOS, we’ll definitely want to have some end users test for us. We will keep you in mind!