Let’s start from the beginning, you can have a desktop computer like a Mac Mini or Mac Studio in combination with a MacBook, but having your work spread in multiple devices isn’t the best for project management, and with the recent releases from Apple with its Apple Silicon CPU/GPUs bringing desktop performance to portable devices you can just work from a laptop, and for people who like to edit and work in a bigger and multiple external screen, having a dongle with several cables connected isn’t the best option.

For years I dreamed of having a powerful enough laptop that after a day of work I could just plug into a dock so I can use my two external displays, external drives, speakers and devices working immediately, but most docks didn’t had the necessary power or bandwidth to handle all, until the release of Thunderbolt 5, so when iVANKY announced the release of the FusionDock Max 2 I was quite enthusiastic to try it out.

After a month of using it, I can say it is almost the perfect MacBook dock, with some caveats:

• One of the things that sold me out on the idea of getting the iVANKY FusionDock Max 2 was the S/PDIF output, in 2015 Apple had removed the optical audio output from their devices including the Apple TV, so I had to rely in an HDMI Audio Extractor with Optical Toslink S/PDIF. As soon as I had the dock I connected the speakers using the optical cable, but I was unable to send the digital encoded signal to the speakers, sadly, the optical audio doesn’t allow encoded output and it just support stereo output, so back to the HDMI work around.
• I have two external displays: one uses HDMI and the other uses DisplayPort. The iVANKY FusionDock Max 2 has only one HDMI port, while the other three external display ports are USB-C/Thunderbolt ports that output a DisplayPort Alternate Mode (DP-Alt) signal. For those, you need a passive USB-C to DisplayPort cable, not the common active adapters. Luckily, Amazon has them.

Apart of that, the LAN port works quite well with my 10G network, copying things from one external drive to another or to the MacBook drive is lightning fast, the microSD card reader is amazingly fast, the dock works quietly even in hot summer days and everything works smoothly, even when everything is working at the same time.

I think iVANKY can improve on their next iteration with:

• An optical S/PDIF jack that supports encoded digital output like Dolby and/or DTS, even multiple channels like any cheap HDMI dongle can.
• A 10G LAN port.
• Two HDMI outputs instead of just one.
• More than just two USB-A jacks at the back, in fact, move all at the back leaving just two at the front.
• A consistent labeling on the ports, because some ports state the USB version, some state the bandwidth, make up your mind.
• A CFexpress Type B card reader, this is a most!

That would make the perfect dock for any MacBook for video content creators, and yes, I realize that the FusionDock Ultra already has the 10G LAN and DisplayPort at the back, but has lesser USB-A ports, lacks the encoded audio output and CFexpress Type B, and it is $250 more expensive.

By the way, I was horrified when I saw that the dock had three USB Type-A v2.0 (480 Mbps) ports. USB 2.0 was released in April 2000, and then I found that the RODECaster Pro II uses USB 2.0 over USB-C, so I used that old port for that. Quite amazing that new devices still drag technology that it’s 26 years old.

I include a diagram of the ports with its bandwidth, quite useful to know what to connect where:

The iVANKY FusionDock Max 2 is currently available in B&H Photo for $399.99, highly recommended.