USB is still problematic, I have problems with mouse, screen, drive, hub and so on.

richtera wrote:

Ok, I have been unsuccessful to get help from apple, because I cannot take all the affected devices and set it up for them to check. It's been kind of a problem. All I can say is that it's getting worse and my ubuntu and windows laptops connected to the same dock have no problems. So I agree it's kind of a flaky report, sorry. I will mess around with it a bit more, but on every OS upgrade more things go wrong.

Well, you won’t trust one of the tools we use here, and you shouldn’t trust anything on the internet including us. You’ll have decide whether an unfounded distrust is more important than fixing your problems. I don’t know if EtreCheck will tell us anything, but there isn’t much else besides talking to Apple.

Docks are notoriously flakey on Macs. I don’t know whether it is Apple or the dock manufacturer, but there are docks that work and many docks that don’t.

I have two I use on Sonoma and now Sequoia that don’t not cause any problems. When I bought them many years ago, I spent quite a bit of time researching to find one that didn’t seem to be problematic on macOS. I use a Hyper Drive dock on my MacBook Pro M2, and I think the one at home is an Avia dongle. Not sure of the name. The dongle is about four years old, and the Hyper Drive is much older.

Thank you for the report.

A few things that stand out rather quickly:

1) Your system drive and your external drive are very full. Each has way less than 10% free, and this is a problem, especially with the system drive. Unfortunately, the OS does not immediately turn the "available" space free, so although it says 160GB "available", and 70GB "free", those extra 90GB are system discretion.

As a general rule, strive to have system drives with at least 15-20% free, and other drives at least 10-15% free.

2) There are a lot of system and kernel extensions present, and some of the software was installed in 2017 or 2018, which indicates that a system migration from an old mac or perhaps more was done. While this is extremely convenient, doing this over a long time can result in old stuff being accumulated. In this case, it is not just transitioning from a mac to another and an OS to another (or multiple versions), it is also from a different architecture (Intel vs Apple Silicon).

That is why it is usually recommended, when moving to another mac, to migrate ONLY the user accounts, and install software fresh.

3) Among your hubs there is a mention of USB2. Having a USB2 device on a bus can slow down everything else on the same bus, even if the other devices can support USB3.

Thank you, so presumably the CalDigit dock has its own power, which is good.

At this point, it would be great if you had the option to test with a different dock, but I understand that this is not easy (unless you have a friend nearby that can lend you one to test).

One thing that you can do is connect at least some of the USB devices directly to your mac (using only a passive and inexpensive adapter) and see how this affects (or does not affect) the issue at hand.

To clarify, I mean one of these adapters that has a male USB-C plug and a female USB-A on the other end:

What brand and model hub is it? Self or bus powered?

What do you have connected and running from the hub?

Have you installed and run any "cleaning", "optimizing", "speed-up", anti-virus or VPN apps on your Mac?

There could be a hardware problem with your USB subsystem, and there could be software issues, not necessarily with system - it could be that you have third party software modifications causing problems, we just don't know. FWIW, you symptoms are serious but fortunately not common, which suggests there may be specific local causes.

If we are to troubleshoot further, we need more information. Please run Etrecheck and post its full report here. Use the "additional text" button and paste the report into the text box.

I am sorry that you are having such a bad experience.

If your terrible experience were common, we'd have heard an outcry.

Some issues, probably not so impactful on usability as yours, have resulted in threads here with dozens of pages and hundreds of posts. One would expect that severe failure with USB, if prevalent, would cause a lot of people to post and complain, and that has not happened.

Thus it seems more likely to be a local problem. Maybe the USB subsystem in your Mac has a fault, maybe it is your hub, and maybe it is software.

If you decide to post an Etrecheck report, as suggested, I will take a look, and perhaps others too, and maybe we can find something.

Also: if you can test by connecting devices directly to your mac, or using a different hub, it may help narrowing it down. By your description my first suspect would be your hub.

If you are attaching drives to your hub and they fail, it usually indicates a power problem. You should not attach hard drives to an unpowered hub, as the USB ports on the hub may not give out enough juice to power the drive. A powered USB hub, or connecting the drive directly to your mac, would be preferable (you may need a small USB-C to USB-A adapter if your drive only has a USB-A connection, but that is fine).

richtera wrote:

etrecheck sounds pretty good but it's not an apple tool and doesn't have the privacy page where they say it should be. How can I trust it?

You should call AppleCare and get help directly from Apple.

It is made by a long time contributor and respected member of this community to help users like me here help others, by providing a report that tells what mac, what OS, what drives and what software modifications are installed. It is used here many times each day and does not modify anything.

It is utterly safe. It's up to you to use or not, of course.

Maybe not all accessories were disabled, but probably only one that was using a lot of power.

There is only a limited power out from USB port on your mac, and if you use an unpowered hub with several devices connected to it, that all adds up and may be more than the port can provide, resulting in the situation you are facing.

If I am right, then waiting for a software update to fix what is not broken is futile.

You would need either to get a self-powered hub, distribute the devices between different USB ports on your mac (there are three, I think), or both. In particular, hard drives need a significant amount of power, and failures like this could lead to data loss.

Also, CalDigit is a brand with good reputation, but there is an off chance you may have gotten a hub that is somehow defective.