I find this very useful if I'm rushing out and I want to grab the laptop, if it's white I know I've shut down already and I'm not gonna be forcibly ejecting anything. if you fully shut down the Mac, the logo goes white.

It goes white when it is not talking to the computer, e.g. The OWC has a useful led inside the logo on the top of the dock, when your computer is awake and talking to it over Thunderbolt, the logo is blue, even when sleeping. I should also point out I had bought the Caldigit TS3 prior to this, but ultimately returned it as it was having 'rediscovery' problems when you woke the computer and things weren't coming back without you unplugging and replugging them. If you're looking for a dock to go with one of these M1 machines, the OWC is absolutely rock solid. I can operate the Air either lid open or clamshell and the option is there for extended desktops or mirroring (I mirror). I have a Club3d USB-C to Displayport (CAC-1567) dongle on one of the OWC's ports that goes to my docked monitor.

The only reason I'm not doing that now (I plug the UFX+ directly into the 2nd Thunderbolt port on the Air) is that I needed another USB-C port for an SSD, but you could operate on one Thunderbolt cable if you want to. To my surprise this worked perfectly, there's no slowdown or anything when hooking the Thunderbolt audio interface through the dock. When I first set it up I had the RME UFX+ connected to one of the extra Thunderbolt ports on the OWC dock, so that I could plug the main dock Thunderbolt cable into the M1 Air and basically the entire studio was connected. The dock powers the Macbook Air, so I only need to plug in the dock and everything is attached.

I'm running a small secondary buss powered USB-C dock off this one just to add a few non-critical USB ports for things like iLok and dongle for a Logitech Mx Keys. I have something connected to every port on the dock, mostly USB-C/3 SSDs and Cirklon USB, Ethernet, apart from maybe the SD card/headphone socket. When I'm talking about the OWC Dock, this is specifically the one called OWC Thunderbolt Dock, no numbers in the name, and it is Thunderbolt 4. I'm using the OWC Thunderbolt Dock with the M1 Air as main studio machine just now (have the 16 MBP on the way).

Thunderbolt 2 dock macbook pro