At certain times, you want to work on a single laptop screen in the living room, and at others, you buckle down at a desk with a more elaborate multi-screen setup and desktop peripherals. And in these fraught days, with most business travel reduced to wearing a path in the carpet between your home office and the kitchen, flexibility matters.
But many offices around the globe still rely on legacy ports such as HDMI and USB 3.0, not to mention SD card readers and Ethernet for wired connections. Thunderbolt and wireless connectivity are perfectly serviceable for most mobile professionals while they're out and about. Check out our primers on Thunderbolt 3 and Thunderbolt 4 to learn what makes Thunderbolt different from USB-C. Like Henry Ford's Model T, which gave you a choice of colors (so long as you chose black), modern MacBooks give you your choice of ports, so long as they are Thunderbolt ports.Īpple uses Thunderbolt 3 on laptops with Intel processors, and Thunderbolt 4 on laptops with Apple's own M1 processor. You'll have to eject each drive (Thunderbolt and USB) manually if you want to guard against data corruption.Apple's MacBook Pro, MacBook Air, and discontinued MacBook are remarkable laptops, but they don't make for the best desktop alternatives right out of the box.
While I haven't lost any data on Thunderbolt hard drives from this procedure, I have experienced errors in the past after failing to properly eject USB flash drives in macOS. Speaking of the drives, whenever I switched between them I received a "Disk not ejected properly" error message, which made me a bit uneasy. You should have no problem shuttling data back and forth between the external hard drives and your Macs. The connected LaCie d2 SSD could read and write at speeds equivalent to our review test numbers and the Ethernet showed good throughput on, indicating that the Thunderbolt 2 interface runs at spec speeds. Unfortunately, unlike more IT-minded KVM switches, the Docking Station doesn't support a hotkey combination (such as Command+Shift+F12) for moving between Macs.
#Macbook pro docking station kvm mac
The HDMI and Thunderbolt displays reacted quickly after a switch, and the Thunderbolt drives connected to the other Mac showed up after a few seconds. Switching between the two Macs was easy, requiring just a quick tap of the buttons on the top panel. I also plugged the dock into our Fios Ethernet network and added a 1,920-by-1,200-resolution HDMI display, a LaCie d2 Thunderbolt 2 drive with SSD accessory, a G-Technology G-Drive ev ATC With Thunderbolt, and an Apple Thunderbolt Display.
To test, I hooked up a 21.5-inch iMac and a 13-inch MacBook Pro with Touch Bar (using an Apple Thunderbolt 2–to–Thunderbolt 3 adapter) to the Docking Station's two switchable Thunderbolt 2 ports. The dock lacks USB-C or Thunderbolt 3, two newer interfaces that are just starting to become commonplace, so you'll need to use an adapter for more recent Macs and PCs.
#Macbook pro docking station kvm portable
You can connect a portable USB hard drive or your iPhone cable to a front-mounted USB 3.0 port. There's also a jack for the included AC adapter, an Ethernet port, an eSATA port, an audio-in jack, and a headphone jack. You can also share peripherals like a keyboard, a mouse, and a drawing tablet via two USB 2.0 ports and two USB 3.0 ports on the back panel.
The Docking Station has dual monitor support (for a total of three including the built-in display of an iMac, MacBook Air, or MacBook Pro) thanks to the HDMI port the Docking Station supports up to 4K displays.
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