You plug in one cable. Your laptop screen joins two external monitors, charges itself, pulls in your wired keyboard, mouse, ethernet connection, and a USB stick — all simultaneously. That moment, the first time it actually works, feels almost suspiciously good.

That's the promise of a USB-C docking station. For years the reality lagged well behind: dodgy drivers, screens that flickered, hubs that overheated, or docks that only worked reliably with one brand of laptop. But things have quietly got much better, and the Anker 575 13-in-1 USB-C Docking Station (street price around £110–£120) is a reasonable illustration of just how far the category has come.

Here's an honest look at what it does, who should buy one, and where it still lets you down.

What Actually Is a Docking Station — and Do You Need One?

A docking station (sometimes called a hub, though a hub is usually simpler) is a box that sits on your desk and expands a single USB-C or Thunderbolt port into a whole desktop's worth of connections. You plug everything into the dock once, then each morning you connect your laptop with a single cable — and your whole desk springs to life.

They're genuinely useful for:

  • Anyone who works from home and wants a proper desk setup without a tangle of individual cables
  • Small-business owners who switch between the office and home and want an identical setup in each place
  • People who've bought a modern thin laptop and discovered it has only one or two ports
  • Anyone running a second monitor (or wanting to) without buying a new computer

If you always work at the same desk, never move your laptop, and your screen situation is simple, you may not need one. But for the rest of us, a decent dock can transform how a laptop feels to use.

What the Anker 575 Gets Right

The headline number is thirteen ports, which sounds like marketing fluff until you realise you'll actually use most of them. You get:

  • Two HDMI outputs and one DisplayPort — meaning you can drive up to three external displays from one laptop (subject to your laptop supporting it — more on that below)
  • 85W power delivery back to your laptop, so you can ditch the original charger entirely
  • Gigabit ethernet — crucial for reliable video calls and file transfers
  • Five USB-A ports (three at the back, two on the front) and two USB-C ports
  • A microSD and full SD card reader on the front
  • A 3.5mm audio jack

The build quality is solid without being flash — a matte grey block about the size of a fat paperback. It runs warm under heavy use but never hot. The front-panel ports are genuinely handy for plugging in a USB stick or camera card without rooting around behind the desk. Anker's 18-month warranty and customer service reputation are both meaningfully better than no-name alternatives at similar prices.

In day-to-day use with a Windows laptop (tested on a mid-range Dell and an HP EliteBook), everything just worked. Plug in, all three screens lit up, ethernet connected, no driver installation required. That reliability — boring as it sounds — is the main thing you're paying for over a £30 generic hub.

What It Doesn't Do Quite So Well

Here's where honesty matters, because reviews that skip the downsides are just adverts.

The triple-monitor trick isn't guaranteed. Whether you can actually run three external screens simultaneously depends entirely on your laptop's USB-C or Thunderbolt chipset, not just the dock. Many mainstream laptops — including some otherwise excellent ones — simply won't support three displays via USB-C, no matter what you plug into. Before buying, check your laptop's specifications carefully, or bring it in and we can tell you in about two minutes.

Mac users hit a wall. Apple Silicon Macs (M1, M2, M3, M4 chips) are limited by Apple to a single external display via USB-C unless you use DisplayLink technology — which requires driver software and a DisplayLink-equipped dock. The Anker 575 does not use DisplayLink, so M-series Mac owners wanting multiple screens should look elsewhere. (Older Intel Macs are fine.)

85W charging is enough for most laptops, but not all. High-performance laptops — gaming machines or workstation-class models — can demand 100W or more. The dock will still charge them, just not at full speed while under heavy load.

No Thunderbolt 4 certification. If your laptop has a Thunderbolt 4 port and you want to squeeze out maximum bandwidth — say, for 4K video editing across multiple screens — a Thunderbolt 4 certified dock (typically £200+) will serve you better.

How It Compares to Cheaper Alternatives

You can buy USB-C hubs for £25–£40 that look similar on paper. The real-world differences tend to be:

  • Cheaper hubs often can't reliably drive two displays simultaneously — one port ends up mirroring rather than extending
  • Power delivery is lower (45W or 60W), meaning your laptop slowly discharges during heavy use
  • Ethernet performance can be unreliable or capped at 100Mbps rather than Gigabit
  • USB ports share bandwidth in ways that cause slowdowns when you use several at once

Whether those compromises matter depends on what you're doing. For light use — one screen, a mouse, and occasional USB stick — a cheaper hub is probably fine. For a proper home-office setup that needs to be dependable every day, the step up to something like the Anker 575 tends to pay for itself in frustration avoided.

Honest Verdict

The Anker 575 is a genuinely good product for the right user. If you have a Windows laptop with a USB-C or Thunderbolt port, you want a clean one-cable desk setup, and you'd like the option of two or three external screens, it's one of the most sensible buys in this price bracket. It's reliable, well-built, and does what it says without needing technical fiddling.

It is not the right choice if you have an Apple Silicon Mac and want multiple displays, if you need Thunderbolt 4 performance, or if you're expecting it to work miracles with a laptop whose USB-C port only carries data and no video signal.

As always with any hardware purchase, the spec sheet only tells half the story. The other half is whether your specific laptop will play nicely with it — and that's worth checking before you open the box.

You can find this and other kit we genuinely recommend on our recommended products page. If you're not sure whether a docking station will work with your laptop, or you'd like help setting one up, we're happy to take a look — it's usually a quick conversation.