The industry is transitioning away from Thunderbolt 3 and embracing Thunderbolt 4. Thunderbolt 5 (on the PC) is here, but not quite ready for prime time. You can call it a laptop dock, a laptop ...

Your laptops don’t have enough ports for that or you might want a more convenient solution, and if that’s the case then Thunderbolt 3 docking stations for laptops are what you need.

then you really should buy a TB4 dock if you need more ports than those 14/16in laptops already possess. USB-C and Thunderbolt 3 docks will work as Thunderbolt 4 is backwards compatible.

The best laptop docking stations add ... this dock can help any compatible USB-C or Thunderbolt 3 device drive up to four displays and all the additional ports while charging the host device ...

Putting USB4 bandwidth to good use, QNAP introduces two adaptors that can free your laptop from the constraints of Wi-Fi.

one upstream Thunderbolt 4 port (for connecting to your laptop), and a USB 3.2 Gen 2 data port at up to 10Gbps. The selection is far from comprehensive — I would have liked to see an SD card ...