Don’t you always feel a little tingle of victory when you find a deal you’re not supposed to know about? In this case, Plugable is sneaking in a 41 percent off Black Friday deal on its Thunderbolt 4 docking station for laptops… that’s trying to avoid the Windows PC market.
The weird thing about this superb $140 Amazon deal is that it’s being pushed at Mac snobs, but this “Plugable Thunderbolt 4 Dock for M4 MacBook Air & Pro” is not exclusively designed for Macs. It’s a plug-and-play Thunderbolt 4 dock that works just as well on your Windows PC—no special software or drivers required!
Thunderbolt 4 docks are still the sweet spot for a laptop docking station in 2025 and 2026. Yes, Thunderbolt 5 docks are rolling out, but unless you have a laptop that supports it—and those laptops tend to be the most expensive premium gaming laptops of 2025—the cheaper Thunderbolt 4 spec is what you want. (I’ve reviewed the best Thunderbolt docks for several years now.) Plugable’s discounted TBT-UDM laptop dock is one of the least expensive docks in the category, even among my list of the best Black Friday laptop dock deals.
Plugable has an excellent reputation, alongside brands like Kensington. This dock has a pair of HDMI display ports, capable of 4K output at 60Hz apiece. The only customers who should pass this by are high-end gamers. While this dock supports lower resolutions at high refresh rates, it lacks the DisplayPort output gamers typically prefer. On the other hand, virtually every monitor on the planet has HDMI, which this dock supports.
This dock hits all the necessities: four USB-A ports for legacy devices like printers, keyboards, and mice; an additional USB-C / Thunderbolt 4 port for daisy-chaining a device or charging a smartphone; SD/microSD inputs, and a 3.5mm headphone jack. It also pushes 100W of power to your laptop, which should be sufficient for all but a gaming laptop.
Yes, Plugable’s dock does have the boring “space gray” colorway that screams “Mac” instead of the sexier black or silver that characterizes the PC market. Otherwise, this is a perfectly great Windows laptop docking station that’s already on a terrific Black Friday sale.
Plugable’s Thunderbolt 4 dock is a Black Friday steal for 41% off
