Modern laptops keep shedding ports, and the fix is usually a small aluminum brick you forget about until it saves your presentation. Acer’s 5-in-1 USB-C hub is one of the cheaper ways to get there. Amazon currently has it on sale for $15.97, down from its $19.99 list price, a 20% discount on an Amazon’s Choice hub that outputs 4K at 60Hz over HDMI, passes through 100W of charging and adds a 5Gbps USB-C data port alongside two USB-A ports.
Five Ports, One Cable and No More Dongle Pile
The HDMI port is the reason most people buy a hub like this, and Acer has not cut the corner cheaper models do. This one drives a 4K display at a full 60Hz over HDMI 2.0, rather than the 30Hz that turns cursor movement into a slideshow on bargain adapters. For video editing, gaming on a big screen or just a smooth external monitor at the office, that doubling of refresh rate is the single spec that separates a usable hub from a frustrating one.
Power delivery is the second thing to get right, and here the hub accepts up to 100W on its USB-C PD 3.0 input and hands roughly 90W through to the laptop. That is enough to keep a 15-inch MacBook Pro or a Dell XPS charging under load, though Acer is upfront that you need to bring your own 100W charger and cable to hit that figure. Anything smaller works too, just with proportionally less power reaching the machine.
On the data side, there is a USB-C 3.0 port and a USB-A 3.0 port, both rated at 5Gbps, so external SSDs, card readers and flash drives transfer at proper speed. The third data port is USB-A 2.0, which sounds like a downgrade until you consider what it is for. Acer intends it for a wireless mouse or keyboard receiver, where USB 2.0 is plenty and its lower-frequency signal avoids the interference that USB 3.0 ports sometimes cause with 2.4GHz dongles.
The whole thing is wrapped in an aluminum shell that doubles as a heatsink, which matters more than you would think on a hub pushing 4K video and 90W of power at the same time. It is slim enough to disappear into a laptop sleeve pocket. Compatibility covers Windows, macOS and ChromeOS, and Acer lists MacBook Air and Pro, iPad Pro, Surface, ThinkPad and Dell XPS among tested devices. The iPhone 17 Pro and 16 Pro Max also work, since both carry USB-C ports with DisplayPort Alt Mode.
One caveat before buying. The hub only works with full-featured USB-C ports that support DisplayPort Alt Mode, power delivery and data. Many budget Windows laptops and older phones have USB-C connectors that only handle charging, and on those the HDMI output will simply do nothing. If you are unsure, check whether your laptop maker advertises video output over USB-C. There is also no Ethernet or SD card slot here, which is the trade-off for the price and size.