 Everyone is making notebooks thinner at the expense of onboard I.O. The writing's on the wall. The future is going to be a dongleful one. So I can either live in denial or I can make your dongle shopping, whether you self-identify as a Mac or a PC, a little bit easier. TunnelBear is the simple VPN app that makes it easy to browse privately and enjoy a more open internet. To try TunnelBear for free, check out the link in the video description. Let's take a quick look at all the contenders for Dongle King I ordered from Amazon. You'll find links in the video description before moving on to performance in order of cheapest to most expensive. This G-Ting product may have multiple typos in the product description, but with its promise of three USB ports and a wired gigabit network connection for 18 bucks, it definitely needed a closer look. The Mokin USB-C to USB 3 adapter caught my attention because at only $20, it offers four USB ports and a female type C to handle higher draw devices or charging pass-through. This VGA and USB hub from Aukey stood out as a great option for business, since it still has four USB 3 ports and adds VGA for the boardroom projector for only $6 more, or quite a lot more if you want the HDMI version. An HDMI option for less than that one, this QHE Trend adapter looks like a pretty good deal at $28, as long as you don't expect to add a ton of USB devices. Then, if you want to add SD card reader functionality, you're looking at stepping up to this model from Lanbo or... Hmm. I actually ordered the same product from two different brands to see if they were truly identical, and they are. I also picked up this unit from Hutu because of its solid reviews and availability in rose gold, even though it seems a little overpriced on paper. And finally, there's the dongle I ordered a couple of months ago for my Blade laptop, the tedious shopping experience for which inspired this video, the Juiced Systems Bizhub. So, we'll start with what all the devices have in common. They are all lower-cost USB 3, not Thunderbolt 3, meaning bandwidth and power delivery are both limited. So, don't expect to plug in multiple high-power devices and get the full experience, unless you invest in an external power brick. My attempts to get around this with another port on the laptop... My attempts to get around this with another port on the laptop, like I've seen with some external drives in the past, were unsuccessful, though your mileage may vary. They all feel reasonably well-built, with everyone, except Aki and Moken, opting to take it a step further with a metal housing, and every single one of them was completely driverless on both PC and Mac. This is especially important for network cards or SD readers, where you might be plugging them in for the first time out in the field, where there's no Wi-Fi to download a driver from Windows Update. All the dongles have a short, pre-attached cable, eliminating one point of failure and some manufacturing cost, but making them a little bulkier to store, and meaning you can't repurpose the included cable to charge your phone in a pinch, and all but the cheapest dongles used a single, continuous metal jacket for the housing of the connector, instead of this less expensive type. Now let's talk about the differences. For my USB transfer test, I used Angelbird's SSD-to-go PKT 1TB. The Angelbird folks provided us with these for video editing when we're at shows, and they are lit AF. They have excellent performance consistency, and gave me easily repeatable results. Every hub performed nearly identically, with my 10GB test file taking about 30 seconds to transfer from the SSD to the desktop. Curiously, Apple's MacBook Pro USB 3 performance was better across the board than the Razer Blade late 2016. When transferring between SSDs, the more robust hubs flexed their muscles a little bit. Not necessarily in terms of speed, but in terms of completing the race at all. I'll forgive requiring extra wall power to handle a couple of SSDs, but Hutu, Mokin, and QHE Trend all failed this test miserably for a variety of reasons. As for HDMI output, all of these hubs are HDMI 1.4, so up to 4K 30Hz, and all but the QHE Trend performed exactly as expected, with that one working on the PC, but not on the Mac for some reason. All the hubs with SD card readers were able to max out our 90MB test card from Kingston. No one was trying to sneak a USB 2 card reader chip in there, which was nice, but the same can't be said for Ethernet. If you were hoping for full gigabit speeds, the G-Ting is too good to be true. It's faster than 100Mbps, but not nearly as fast as the juiced systems. So conclusion time then. I'm feeling great about the choice I made with the juiced systems bizhub. It runs a little warm, and it's one of the most expensive, but it's a compact, one-piece solution that saves me from carrying additional dongles for proper full speed gigabit Ethernet and reading SD and micro SD cards. The Aukey adapters blew me away with their power efficiency. They were the only ones that could reliably power two SSDs on both Windows and Mac OS without external power, making the VGA one a great option, even if you pretty much just want a USB hub. And the G-Ting gets my value award. It doesn't have charging pass-through or the highest performance, but it's really compact and cheap if you just want more USB ports and a wired network connection. But what if what you really want is an easier way to do your accounting? Ah, yes. For that, you want FreshBooks. It's been redesigned from the ground up, custom-built for how you want to work, and it's a simple way to be more productive, more organized, and get paid quickly. You can create and send professional-looking invoices in seconds. You can set up online payments with just a couple clicks. You can see when your client has seen your invoice and put an end to the guessing game. And basically, if you're a freelancer or you run a small business, whether it's small-time computer repair or you are a plumber or you're a house painter, FreshBooks is all about making your life easier. So try it out. You get 30 days of unrestricted free trialness by heading to freshbooks.com slash tech tips and you're entering Linus Tech Tips in the How You Heard About Us section. So thanks for watching, guys. If this video sucked, you know what to do. But if it was awesome, get subscribed, hit that like button or check out the link to where to buy the stuff we featured at Amazon in the video description. Also linked down there is our merch store, which has cool shirts like this one in our community forum, which you should totally join. Now that you're done doing all that stuff, check out our other videos. Boom, done.