Hi there, I am posting this from a Lenovo E495 laptop, the same as the original poster was asking about. For those who don't know this laptop, it has a single USB-C port which is also used for charging the laptop - there is no separate power input, that's it.
Just today I ordered a generic USB hub with up to 100 W "Power Delivery" and can confirm that this feature works as it should with this laptop. Power delivery (also called "power pass through") is a standard feature and you do not require a manufacturer specific device to support this. The hub that I bought is a very cheap and generic NEWLINK NLUSB3C-7PHUB which I got from scan.co.uk.
This hub also supports HDMI video output, and I can confirm that this works perfectly well with the E495 laptop. This allows me to run two external monitors, since this laptop also has a dedicated HDMI output, and since the Lenovo data sheet is a little vague about the graphics output, I can confirm that it runs two external 1080p monitors at 60 Hz while also running the laptop display at native resolution and refresh rate. If you are looking to push 4K displays or higher refresh rates then obviously the information here may not be sufficient to advise you on that.
I think the reason for the accepted answer from "
hang-the-9" is that we are going to see a lot more vendor-specific device-matching due to a USB-C feature called "USB-C alternate mode". This mode allows the physical pins of the USB-C connector to be remapped to anything the manufacturer wants them to. Such a feature is important for allowing devices (think small, thin, light) to have a single USB-C port that can "do anything" for the device, including circumstances not covered by the original USB spec. The trade off is compatibility, since there is nothing stopping the manufacturer mapping the pins in any way that they wish, ensuring lock-in for devices such as docks, custom graphics interfaces, analogue audio interfaces, and so on. The real issue is that USB-C alternate mode blurs the line between what functionality is taking place in the device, and what is being performed by the host (e.g. a laptop). Since the great strength of USB devices is their near-universal compatibility, I am critical of the direction that alternate mode may take us in, but of course we'll have to wait and see.
I hope this answers your question about the E495, power delivery, and HDMI output.
PS: Sorry, as a follow up, the reason I posted this reply is that I had the same question as the original poster and found this thread yesterday and just took a risk that the E495 laptop supported power pass through in the way I expected it to. So with some luck my reply will be of help to others. Just to tie up loose ends with regards to power. Very broadly speaking, the laptop requires a certain amount of power (measured in watts, or W for short) to operate and this can go up and down depending on what the laptop is doing, so it's common to talk about the maximum amount of power that it will draw. If the charger is unable to deliver that amount of power, then the laptop will draw from its internal battery, and if the battery runs out then the laptop will turn off. If the laptop is using less than the charger is able to deliver, then the excess power can be used to charge the battery, but this will be determined by the laptop's charging circuit and depends on a number of factors. So you can safely (if you had one) use a 1000 W charger with any laptop and it will never "blow up" the battery. With respects to the USB-C power delivery/pass through feature, what the spec is saying is that this device can allow up to 100 W of power to flow through it to the device, even though the power is coming from the charger. For the specific laptop we are discussing, it was supplied by Lenovo with either a 45 W or a 65 W charger. During general use the laptop is only drawing about 30 W of power, so the smaller charger is sufficient but with less excess power available it charges the battery more slowly. I am using the 65 W charger with this USB pass through hub and since this is less than the 100 W rating of the device, it works exactly as intended. If you tried to run this USB pass through hub with the (fictional) 1000 W laptop charger I mentioned earlier, then it will probably still be safe, since the laptop will never use all of that power anyway. But if you used the hub with a gaming laptop, the sort that typically comes with a 150 W power supply, then this exceeds the rating of the device and it will damage it if the laptop attempts to use all of that 150 W at once (e.g. running a game while charging the battery from empty). The failure mode is difficult to predict, but most likely it would burn out the power delivery circuit. The final caveat is that most gaming laptops use a traditional barrel plug because it has higher power delivery than USB-C, but since the USB-C spec is evolving (about to go to 240 W at the time of writing) the power handling will increase in the future.
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