Microsoft appears to be dumping its Audio Dock — and that means you can score an insane 80-percent-off deal as it falls off the truck, especially if you like external speakers.
Microsoft’s Audio Dock normally costs $249 on its online store. Amazon, however, has it for $47 while Walmart sells it for $49.99. Amazing!
Microsoft launched its Audio Dock in 2022 as a Surface accessory. It definitely has its quirks: It’s a USB-C dock with the capabilities of a Thunderbolt dock — but only if you have the right hardware. If your PC supports Display Stream Compression (DSC) it can output to a pair of 4K displays at 60Hz. But absolutely no PC maker discloses if their hardware supports DSC, including Microsoft. (If you want a Thunderbolt dock without any fuss, check out our best Cyber Monday Thunderbolt dock deals.)
So the Audio Dock is thus a powered dock (it will push 60W of power to your laptop) with one HDMI 2.0 port capable of 4K at 60Hz. A second 10Gbps USB-C port can do the same, but only if DSC is supported. Otherwise, there are two other 10Gbps USB-C ports, one of which supports 7.5W of charging.
But there’s more. The Audio Dock, like the name suggests, offers four of Microsoft’s excellent Omnisonic speakers (two woofers, two tweeters) plus dual-noise cancelling mics, too. There’s a dedicated Teams button, a mic mute, and playback controls. Microsoft makes excellent hardware. It’s just typically priced at a premium. This…decidedly is not!
If you want a pretty good external speaker with PC expansion capabilities and some Teams controls — $50 looks like a pretty darn good steal for Cyber Monday.
Author: Mark Hachman, Senior Editor
As PCWorld's senior editor, Mark focuses on Microsoft news and chip technology, among other beats. He has formerly written for PCMag, BYTE, Slashdot, eWEEK, and ReadWrite.