U2725QE USB hub recognized as 2.0 when connected to MacBook Pro

jlb2003 wrote:

I think I found the solution, I have two of these monitors connected to my M2 Pro Mac mini via thunderbolt cables.

Open the settings panel on the monitor, navigate to "Display" and turn on the "MST" option. After I did this, my USB hub started functioning normally. For some reason with this setting turned off, the monitor is using the entire bandwidth of the TB connection for the video signal.

I saw your reply on the reddit post I made about my troubles with the hub in this display. I'm glad this worked for you! Sadly, it didn't help on my end. I'll be returning this display for the second time.

As a follow up, if you turn on the MST setting and are still having inconsistent connections, I would definitely try swapping out the thunderbolt cable. The one that comes with the monitor is not of the best quality. I am currently using two USB 4/Thunderbolt 4 cables from Silkland in the 5ft length that I got off Amazon. I would be leery of any cable over 5ft for Thunderbolt since the spec requires an "active" cable for connections over 1.5 meters and most of the cables you do find on Amazon are probably of the "passive" type. If you have the budge, the cables from Apple are of excellent quality.

the actual requirement for trouble-free operation of high speed ThunderBolt connections is MUCH shorter -- typically 0.5 meters (1.5 ft) for brand-X cables, up to 0.8 for Apple cables.

ACTIVE ThunderBolt cables have signal re-driver electronics on board, and can much longer lengths. (but at much higher prices).

Same here, display looks good, Thunderbolt upstream to Macbook and Thunderbolt downstream to LaCie SSD Pro work reliably, so does the Magic Keyboard plugged into a USB-A plug in the back of the display. iPhone connects reliably on the front of the display too. Anything else is a gamble, LaCie HDDs with or without power supply mount occasionally. LAN seems flaky too. What I don't get it is that these are all 10Gbps ports. That's excellent for HDDs, no keyboard needs this. Dell advertises this display as the perfect companion for Apple products, but the hub is a mess, right? Any updates on your end? I contacted my local Dell dealer who's getting back to me on the subject next week. He said these hubs should be plug and play. The 10 year old Dell U2414H that I'm upgrading from did all of this no problem. I tried different settings, different cables, etc. nothing works. The MST option below worked for one session. Then again nothing. I'm confused...

smorebelt wrote:

Same here, display looks good, Thunderbolt upstream to Macbook and Thunderbolt downstream to LaCie SSD Pro work reliably, so does the Magic Keyboard plugged into a USB-A plug in the back of the display. iPhone connects reliably on the front of the display too. Anything else is a gamble, LaCie HDDs with or without power supply mount occasionally. LAN seems flaky too. What I don't get it is that these are all 10Gbps ports. That's excellent for HDDs, no keyboard needs this. Dell advertises this display as the perfect companion for Apple products, but the hub is a mess, right? Any updates on your end? I contacted my local Dell dealer who's getting back to me on the subject next week. He said these hubs should be plug and play. The 10 year old Dell U2414H that I'm upgrading from did all of this no problem. I tried different settings, different cables, etc. nothing works. The MST option below worked for one session. Then again nothing. I'm confused...

Yeah, I think the hubs on at least some of these these are just flaky. I've seen enough people saying they've had issues. The hub functionality was half of the reason I chose that Dell and I never got it working so I returned mine. I got an Asus and the build quality is much better, the hub is only USB 3.2, but it works, and the screen is arguably better.

Hi everyone,

Here are ChatGPT's and my findings on an annoying USB hub issue when using the Dell U2725QE monitor as a dock with my 2024 MacBook Pro M4 Max (macOS Sonoma 14.4.1).

The issue:

After a system reboot or cold start, the USB-C hub in the Dell display fails to initialize properly and falls back to USB 2.0 speeds (480 Mb/s). Devices that normally use USB 3.x speeds — like external HDDs or 2.5 GbE Ethernet adapters — either connect with major performance loss or fail to mount at all. This is visible in System Information, where only USB 2.0 hubs are shown, even though the monitor supports USB 3.1 Gen 1 (5 Gb/s).

The temporary workaround we identified:

If you unplug the Thunderbolt 4 / USB-C cable from your Mac before startup, and reconnect it only after logging into your macOS session, the monitor's USB hub reinitializes correctly. At that point, USB 3.x hubs become visible again, external hard drives mount reliably, and full-speed network adapters work as expected.

Why this matters:

The issue lies in how macOS and/or the monitor’s firmware negotiate the USB connection during early boot. If the negotiation fails and defaults to USB 2.0, some devices (especially HDDs) won’t even show up. We’ve submitted a detailed bug report to Dell since this likely requires a firmware update to fix proper USB initialization during host boot.

Until then, the unplug/replug workaround is the only reliable method we’ve found.

Would be great to hear if others have encountered similar behavior — or if Apple engineers can weigh in from the macOS USB initialization side.

Let’s keep this thread alive until Dell or Apple addresses it properly.

Thanks krzysiexp i've followed your thread in the dell community and also here. Ive got 2 x U2725QE monitos via daisychain and only after the full computer reboot with the cable unplugged do i get the full 2.5gb hub connection via thunderbolt. I also called dell to inform them of this issue and asked the team to follow this up and try and provide an update ASAP as this is so fustrating when all I want to do is have a single cable from the laptop to the monitors. This is why i bought them

b8xter wrote:

Thanks krzysiexp i've followed your thread in the dell community and also here. Ive got 2 x U2725QE monitos via daisychain and only after the full computer reboot with the cable unplugged do i get the full 2.5gb hub connection via thunderbolt. I also called dell to inform them of this issue and asked the team to follow this up and try and provide an update ASAP as this is so fustrating when all I want to do is have a single cable from the laptop to the monitors. This is why i bought them

Note that Macs do not support DisplayPort MST daisy-chaining.

So if you are daisy-chaining two Dell UltraSharp 27 4K Thunderbolt Hub Monitor - U2725QE monitors, you'd presumably be connecting and daisy-chaining them using the Thunderbolt upstream and downstream ports. (Rather than using one of the DisplayPort 1.4 output ports to do the daisy-chaining.)

I thought it just resolved the issue but have to toggle the MST to restore USB3.1 speed whenever I switch between DisplayPort to Thunderbolt source device. So, this is not a fix to the issue being reported.

Hi Bretstat

I also feel the same way, i'll post here again once i log a new case with Dell. I posted a new comment on the https://www.dell.com/community/en/conversations/monitors/u2725qe-macbook-pro-m1-usb-hub-recognized-as-20/6800ea1c452ab070263c8a2e?page=2 expanding on my current position right now

Here are some follow-up results on the problem where the U2725QE monitor provides only USB2 speeds (at best) when connected to a Mac by Thunderbolt:

1. To clear the problem, the monitor needs to be started (or restarted) after the Mac has begun loading the OS. 
2. Simply cycling the power button on the back of the monitor, with a pause for 6-8 seconds, will clear the problem. Devices would have to be unmounted manually (‘Ejected’ in Apple-speak).
3. Turning on MST (Multi-Stream Transport) restarts the monitor, just like power cycling. As some contributors here have noted, the effect is temporary and only lasts until the next restart of the computer. Again, devices would have to be unmounted manually. 
4. To demonstrate that MST is no solution to the problem beyond restarting the monitor, note that turning MST from on to off has exactly the same effect as turning it from off to on.
5. The advantage of clearing the problem by restarting the Mac and power cycling the monitor during the restart (as I suggested in an earlier post) is that the OS will unmount the devices and otherwise tidy up before the restart.
6. The additional advantage from a cold start of turning on the computer first and then the monitor after the startup chime is that no additional starts or restarts are needed.
7. The problem does not occur when connecting the monitor by HDMI or DisplayPort, with the USB connection made through the USB upstream port. But that, of course, defeats the objective of a single-cable connection.

I’m still looking to Dell for a proper solution.

Yes, the on-screen display settings, click the navigation nub next to the power button to bring the menu up.

<< My resosolution, hertz, main display were not being remembered >>

The Mac does not rely on Windows-like side-loaded "Drivers" which are actually packages of resolutions and settings for a specific display. Instead, it goes straight to the immutable source -- it asks the display itself.

To get a Mac display to become active, you need the Mac to query the display, and the display to answer with its name and capabilities. Otherwise, the display will not be shown as present, and no data will be sent to the display. "No signal detected" is generated by the DISPLAY, not by the Mac.

This query is only sent at certain times:

• at startup

• at wake from sleep — so momentarily sleeping and waking your Mac may work

• at insertion of the Mac-end of the display-cable, provided everything on that cable is ready-to-go

• hold the Option key while you click on the (Detect Display) button that will appear in Displays preferences (from another display)

NB > Be sure you are running your experiments accordingly.

The USB failure of the U2725QE is not a MacOS or Apple hardware problem. I replicated the problem with the monitor connected through a Hewlett Packard TB3 hub. As with direct connection, everything works fine after the monitor is power cycled, including USB3 speeds. But if the hub is started with the monitor already powered on, nothing on the monitor's USB bus works at all - not even at the USB2 speeds of the direct connection. This last difference may be due to having TB3 rather than TB4 as the connection protocol.

I would have preferred to run this test using a Windows computer equipped with TB, to completely remove Apple devices from the chain, but I don’t have access to one.

I don’t know what other users have been told, but Dell Australia has said that a firmware update for the U2725QE is expected "around the end of August". I didn't expressly check that the USB problem was being addressed in the update, because my monitor has other problems that I was trying to fix. The kicker for many Mac users may be that Dell's firmware loader will require a Windows computer, I'm told.

UPDATE - I was wrong!!!, the MST has nothing to do with USB-2/3/4. The problem is the link negotiation and it doesn't work well with Mac when monitor is already powered on OR in standby. The only workaround for now is to recycle monitor power when the Mac is online. I have reported the issue on Dell Support as well, but no luck even after months of struggling. Looks like it's macOS issue, because Windows Machine is negotiating the link properly during boot time. When macOS boots up it's not discovering monitor's USB capabilities over thunderbolt.