With Thunderbolt 4 connectivity becoming more and more common in new laptop computers, including various Macs, you may be in the market for a worthy docking station. After all, small, lightweight laptops don’t always have all the ports you need. So it’s a good thing StarTech.com recently released its TB4CDock for Mac and Windows.
The Thunderbolt 4 station bristles with the ports you need to turn your laptop into a desktop, or close to it.
Sonnet Technologies rolled out its new Echo 5 Thunderbolt 4 Hub on Tuesday to enable Mac and iPad Pro users — or anyone with a Thunderbolt 3 or 4 port on their machine — to expand their connectivity to peripherals like displays, input devices and storage. And it offers a robust 85W of charging power.
When you get a computer or tablet and it has fewer ports than you’d like, hubs like this one can come in handy.
No matter how hard you are on your gear, you aren‘t going to destroy the OWC Envoy Pro FX. The 2 terabyte SSD is waterproof and offers military-level drop toughness. Plus the USB-C accessory supports Thunderbolt 3 so data transfers are super fast.
I put the solid state drive through testing. Here’s how it stood up.
You need a powerful dock to make your Mac the center of a highly capable office. The OWC Thunderbolt 3 Dock has fourteen ports for connecting a wide range of peripherals. That includes multiple USB-C ports, something you won’t find on USB-C hubs. Plus there’s USB-A, Ethernet, a headset jack and more.
I added this dock to my office. Here’s how it performs in real-world use.
At a glance you can see that Redditor iEdwinT’s computer setup is spare and neat. You might call it elegant. How does he do it? That’s really down to what you can’t see — a fairly simple but effective cable management operation going on under the desk.
Many folks are working from home a lot, but setting up a proper computer workstation frustrates them. C2G wants to help make it easy with a bunch of new docking kits ready-made to solve connectivity woes, especially if you want your laptop to be more like a desktop computer.
Austin, Texas-based photographer Matt Tran initially built his impressive setup to share his pics on Instagram, and you can certainly see a lot of them there. But now he uses his workstation, centered on a MacBook Pro and two monitors of vastly different sizes, to film and edit videos.
“I like having the 38-inch [LG] ultrawide to view the timeline on Final Cut Pro and the smaller, 15.6-inch Desklab portable monitor to review the footage,” he told Cult of Mac.
The Apple Thunderbolt 3 Pro Cable comes at a price that should make even the most devoted Mac fan blink. At $129, it costs at least $50 more than comparable cables.
Not everything Apple sells is extraordinarily expensive. But it’s undeniable that the company occasionally adds on the “Apple Tax.”
Belkin’s newly-unveiled multiport adapter uses Thunderbolt 3, not just USB-C, and can drive two 4K monitors at 60 Hz. But that’s just the start, as the Dock Core can also transfer data over a USB-C connection at up to 40 Gbps. Plus it includes Gigabit Ethernet, a pair of USB-A ports, audio in/out, and more.
It’s designed to be part of high-performance mobile office, as it does not need a second power source.
Anker boasts that the just-released PowerExpand Elite hub lets you “connect everything imaginable,” and there’s a certain amount of justification. This accessory has no less that 13 ports. There’s Thunderbolt 3, USB-A, USB-C, HDMI, audio ports, memory card readers, and more.
The company also launched on Wednesday the Anker PowerExpand, which “only” has seven ports of a range of types.
