Heres AppleInsiders guide to picking the best Thunderbolt 3 dock for your Mac.This guide aims to demystify the peripheral and to help you narrow down the selection to one or a few that will best suit the job.Think of it as a USB hub, but instead of simply providing more of the same port, the dock usually includes a selection of commonly-used connections, alongside more Thunderbolt 3 ports.
![]() Some models also offer legacy connections, including eSATA, VGA, and occasionally FireWire, which may have limited utility for most users, but could be essential for people with older hardware that simply doesnt support newer variants. Depending on the model of dock and MacBook, a dock can provide enough power to recharge the MacBooks battery, without relying on using one of the main Thunderbolt 3 ports with a separate charger. The maximum of four Thunderbolt 3 ports on a MacBook Pro is relatively limiting, even if you take into account Thunderbolt 3 daisy-chaining, so having more ports that use up just one on the host device is an attractive proposition. Since power is also provided to peripherals as well, this means that connected devices wont be a drain on the host MacBooks battery at all. Instead of relying on having multiple adapters to connect your devices to a MacBook via the few Thunderbolt 3 ports, you instead have one unit that you connect everything through. If the display, network, external drives, speakers, and peripherals are all connected up to the dock, the user could simply connect all of them at once to the MacBook Pro using a single Thunderbolt 3 cable. This will largely be determined by the users present hardware needs, though they will also have to take into account any future items they may need ports for. Its typically better to go over the top with ports than to stick with just what you need. This could open up the choice of docks further, to include docks that lack features that are already serviced by your adapter. Thunderbolt 3 offers 40Gbps of bandwidth, which is a considerable amount to use, but while it is more than enough for a Gigabit Ethernet connection, a display, and a smattering of slower connections, it can still be overwhelmed in some situations. This is unlikely, but possible in some industries, such as in video editing involving multiple clients and high resolution and bitrate files. ![]() In effect, you need a dock with at least 30W power delivery to fully power a MacBook Air, a 60W version for a 13-inch MacBook Pro, 87W for the 15-inch MacBook Pro, and 96W for the 16-inch MacBook Pro. This would be a step up from Wi-Fi for those with a physical network to connect to, but its not essential unless you have high bandwidth needs. While AppleInsider first looked at it at the start of 2018, the dock is still actively in use by one writer after all of this time. It is very hard not to recommend the CalDigit Thunderbolt Station 3 Plus to anyone looking for a dock. In the case of eGPU enclosures, they hold an external graphics card to augment the video processing capabilities of the Mac, as the name suggests. For a start, the enclosures dont have to be equipped with an eGPU, as they offer a PCIe expansion slot. ![]() In rare situations, there is the opportunity to add a hard drive to an eGPU enclosure, turning it into an external storage device. The specifications can be tricky to understand, and worse, they may not even work on Macs with newer OS versions.
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December 2020
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