Thunderbolt Dock

I’m finally embracing Thunderbolt. Most of the machines• I’m using these days has at least this port:
Side view of Apple laptop highlighting Thunderbolt 1/2 port
Side view of Apple laptop highlighting Thunderbolt 1/2 port

The idea was to be able to swap in a laptop into my corner workstation (eventually, when I get the Mac Pro running again, with a KVM (with Extended Display Identification Data (EDID) emulation‡)) with its gorgeous (matte!) Dell U2417H Ultrasharp 24 inch Infinity Edge Monitor, Drop Tokyo 60 keyboard, Loxjie A30 amp and Klipsch Synergy Black Label B-100 Bookshelf Speakers, Logitech M535 mouse (though I might move to something with a dongle, for ease and speed of switching between devices; I like the M585 so far). I hit eBay to pick up an OWC Thunderbolt 2 dock (manual):

Side view of Apple laptop highlighting Thunderbolt 1/2 port
Back of Thunderbolt 2 Dock showing ports
 
It had everything I was looking for this configuration:

  • 5x USB 3.1 rev 1 ports (connected to the hub in the Dell monitor, the Loxjie amp, etc) (two are on the side of the hub)
  • 3.5mm headphone and microphone jacks with onboard Burr-Brown audio hardware (not currently used, but might move the Bose QC25 over to it to avoid using the SoundBlaster Play! 3, which I no longer trust to be reliable, since I’ve had two fail spontaneously)
  • FireWire 800 (I still have some old DV footage I need to import)
  • Gigabit Ethernet (I live in a WiFi hellspot, where I can see a bazillion other networks at full strength, with no clear channels, so I still rely heavily on copper networking)
  • 2x Thunderbolt 2 connectors (one connects to the laptop; the other can daisy-chain additional Thunderbolt devices, or can be used as a Mini Displayport output to drive a monitor, at up to 4K/60Hz)
  • HDMI 1.4b (only supports 4K at 30 Hz but since the highest-res non-TV screens I have are 2K, and most of what I use is 1920x1080, it’s fine for me)

(Another option would have been the current Thunderbolt 3 dock, which would work with (at least) the Thunderbolt 2 machines in my collection. But I wanted the legacy ports, especially FireWire, and don’t currently need the USB-C connectivity for my older kit.)

The setup works great, I’m typing this now on the 2015 11" Air. It’s responsive with no lagging, artifacts etc., even when I’m driving a monitor, watching a 1080p video (H264 MPEG-4) streaming from my NAS, while transferring ~43 GB of different sizes of files over the Ethernet port (also from the NAS) and listening to the video file through the DAC/Amp. (Though com.apple.DriverKit-AppleEthernetE1000 is spiking the CPU with the network load.)

Update (10/3): I’ve now also successfully used this setup with the 2022 M2 MacBook Air 13.6" (Thunderbolt 3), using the adapter below. Works perfectly.

To hook everything up, I needed Apple’s Thunderbolt Cable (for the 2012–2015 era machines), and Thunderbolt 3 (USB-C) to Thunderbolt 2 Adapter (which is bidirectional, so would also work to connect the older hardware to a newer, USB-C connector, Thunderbolt hub):

Thunderbolt Cable
Thunderbolt Cable

Thunderbolt 3 to Thunderbolt 2 Adapter top view
Thunderbolt 3 to Thunderbolt 2 Adapter top view  

Thunderbolt 3 to Thunderbolt 2 Adapter end view
Thunderbolt 3 to Thunderbolt 2 Adapter end view








• The only machines I have that don’t support the protocol are my 2010 MacBook Air (Core 2 Duo, 4GB RAM, probably time to retire it) and the 2007 MacBook (which doesn’t turn on at the moment, it’s probably dead). 

‡ Does anyone remember manually inputting video timings for monitors in the earlier days of Linux, and how cool it was when (what I knew then as VESA) standards emerged and such things could be auto-detected and a monitor used with XFree86 without worrying about the magic smoke escaping...? (Looks like the mid-90s is when this was standardized; since most of my PC gear then was older hand-me-down stuff, like a 14" NEC MultSync 2A from 1990, I didn’t get the benefit until I got my first “real” job circa 2000 and upgraded to a MAG 17" CRT.)

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