What is going on, everybody?
My name is Mike Caputo and in today's video, I'm reviewing
the Thunderbolt 4 Power Hub from Hyper.
Now, the Power Hub is a cost-effective way of scaling
up the number of ports that you have on your Mac, your PC,
your Chromebook, or even your iPad Pro.
Yes, believe it or not.
But the question is the Power Hub the best Thunderbolt 4 dock
or hub for you?
Well, in today's video, I'm going to tell you what all
the features are of the Thunderbolt 4 Power Hub after
using it for the past few weeks with my MacBook Pro and
my iPad Pro.
Let's get started.
Now, my name is Mike Caputo, and here I help people that are
just like you make the best purchase decisions when it
comes to their tech and today, we're focusing on the Hyper
Thunderbolt 4 Power Hub.
Full disclosure: I backed this product during the
Kickstarter campaign, which I think started back in August
and I've used this product since it was delivered late
last month, November 2022.
That means that Hyper doesn't sponsor the video, nor do they
have any input to what I'm about to tell you
about this product.
Now, I'll leave links on the script below in case you want
to purchase it, but ultimately it's more helpful to the
channel that if you either A) share the video with someone
else who might find value in it or B) hit the like button.
So YouTube knows that this type of content is valuable to the
people and they pushed out to a broader audience.
Now priced at $299, the Hyper Power Hub has some unique
features that make it an attractive product depending on
what you were looking for in your setup.
First and foremost, the Power Hub has an integrated 141-watt
Gallium Nitride (GaN) power brick that's built right into
the housing of this kind of amazing.
If you think about it.
And it gives it a smaller footprint compared to other
similarly spec Thunderbolt 4 hubs.
In other words, Hyper is able to miniaturize the power brick
into the size of the chassis using Gallium Nitride (GaN) ,
which is a manufacturing technology that are able to
shrink the components for higher power characteristics
that can operate at higher temperatures.
Now, in terms of input source, the only thing that's going to
be hanging off the back here is going to be the six foot long
AC power cable that is designed for North American plugs.
The unit itself supports input power from 110 to 240 volts at
either 50 or 60 hertz, which really means that this
should be able to be used worldwide if you have the
right power, cable or an adapter.
But this unit currently is only being sold in the
United States.
Now, second, since the Power Hub uses the newest Thunderbolt
4 controller, which is Goshen Ridge, it has
better graphics performance thanks to the 32 gigs of
onboard Pci-e bandwidth shared between all four Thunderbolt 4
ports and all four of these ports support Displayport,
that's a lot of ports, 1.4 fully.
Now the Power Hub can support a single 8K display running at 60
hertz or a 4K display running at 144 hertz or two 6K displays
running at 60 hertz, giving it broad compatibility with a
number of different displays that are on the market,
assuming that your PC or Mac can push them.
Now, this does not circumvent an M1 or M2 device where it can
only push out to one display.
That's still a limitation exists and as a hardware
limitation on the host side, this will not solve that
problem at all.
So do not buy this product if you're looking to output your
Mac to more than one display, if your Mac only
supports one display.
Now, in terms of ports.
There are four ports along here.
They're all south facing, which means that they
face you.
And depending on your setup, this will work well with the
MacBook Air or MacBook Pro because the host connection
port is on the side of the device.
Now, if you had a Mac Studio or a Mac mini, it might not be the
best setup because most of those host ports are located
along the back, so you'd have cables traversing your desktop
setup and you may or may not care about that.
I specifically do.
So that's just me though.
Now, the upstream port here on the far right hand side can
deliver 96 watts of power to the host machine and transfer
datas at 40 gigabits per second.
Next, there are three downstream ports.
Each one is 15 watts of power and it can deliver 15 watts to
an accessory like an NVME drive, an IO drive some
type of raid controller or even an external display and they
also support 40 gigabits of throughput as well.
And that's all going to be shared.
Now, this gives the power up a total of 141 watts between
all four ports.
I purchased the Power Hub as I have some extended traveling
going on this summer, and I wanted to use this to replace
my MacBook Pro fast Charger, which I think is maybe like
120 watts, if I'm not mistaken.
But what I plan to do is I use to take my MacBook Pro,
connect it here to this host port.
I would have an NVME drive my SSD drive for editing video
here and then have my iPad Pro, which I would use as
a secondary slave sidecar.
That would leave one open display here on this device and
then two open ports on my MacBook Pro with the addition
of having an HDMI port in case I want to use it with
an external monitor.
So it gives me a lot of flexibility in terms of ports
and connections where I want to use this.
Plus it's going to charge my Mac fast at 96 watts.
Now, like all products, there are a series of tradeoffs
and everything could be better depending on what you are
looking for and what problem that you're trying to solve.
Now, first and foremost, it's completely minor and
absolutely subjective, but this is only available in this
space gray color.
Maybe it matter to you, maybe it doesn't.
If it won't match your set up, that could be something
important to you and you might not want to purchase it.
Second, I think it more importantly is that there are
some people who has received this dock during this
initial period, and they are reporting that when they
connect this dock to their computer and their computer
goes to sleep, that when they try and wake up
their computer, it does not wake their display and they
need to unplug the host port and re plug it back in.
It's not something that is personally affected.
It does obviously wake up the computer in the dock once you
re plug it in.
But since this dock supports the Thunderbolt 4 spec,
I imagine that there is going to be a software update that's
needed from Hyper in order to address this.
But we'll see as time progresses.
This is not officially out for sale through Hyper's website;
again, it's only available on Kickstarter at this point.
But I haven't experienced that problem.
And that's not to say that the problem is not happening or
that it's being minimized because I'm not
experiencing it.
Since there are so many different kind of
configurations that people have kind of unique ness to see
where that problem exactly is happening.
So regarding the price, I would be hard pressed to pay full
retail price for this at $299.
I think given its features and the different competitors that
are on the market, I think it's closer to $229 or $249,
$299 seems like a bit too far for this and I think most
consumers would have that sentiment as well
after using it.
Now, depending on your use case, the Power Hub will
not fit your needs.
If you have to connect several different legacy technologies,
like if you're using USB-A ports or if you have
accessories that have USB ports and they don't require high
bandwidth that comes with Thunderbolt 4 ports,
you probably won't find them.
It's a little bit more affordable and not necessary
this product itself.
Thank you very much for watching my video on the Hyper
Powerport Thunderbolt 4 Dock.
Let me know if you really care about whether the power brick
being built into this or not.
And if you would change any of these ports around here,
would you add USB-A?
Would you maybe add a speaker port or mike port?
Let me know down the comments below.
My name is Mike and I will talk to you guys in the next one.