USB-C ports on newer MacBooks are hiding powerful secrets in plain sight.

Last year, when I was introduced to my new MacBook Pro, I wasn’t happy about having to deal with a whole new ecosystem of chargers and dongles — just to make the stuff I already had work with USB-C. But I did what every Apple customer is used to; upgrade, adapt iDongles, and overcome.

I have circled for you all of the iDongles and adapters involved in allowing me to use my pro workstation: three monitors, an external keyboard and mouse, an external webcam, and external storage.

Apple’s USB-C MacBook pros don’t play very will with others. But what do they play well with? Well, as of today, late January 2019, you cannot buy a new iPhone and a new MacBook from an Apple Store and plug the phone into the computer without dropping another $69 purchasing an iDongle, or third party cable.

Until recently I just accepted that this growing cable spaghetti on my desk was unavoidable (the price of innovation?). But I’ve grown weary of cord-jiggling (they don’t always work right), and getting caught away from my desk with a dying phone and no way to charge it from my machine. I started looking for solutions, and it turns out that I’ve been asking the wrong questions the entire time.

So what’s up with USB-C on the new MacBook Pro? Well, first of all, it isn’t USB-C. These ports are actually Thunderbolt 3 ports delivered through the USB-C cable connector.

What’s the difference? Well, according to this post by the Thunderbolt marketing team at Intel:

USB Type-C, or USB-C, is a specification for connectors and cables …[they are] Symmetrical and flip-able, or reversible … [deliver] up to 100W of power … [and] Supports alternate modes, such as DisplayPort, Thunderbolt, etc.

While Thunderbolt:

Thunderbolt 3 defines a superset of capabilities that runs on USB-C connectors and cables. In brief, Thunderbolt 3 brings Thunderbolt to USB-C. Here are the superset of features that Thunderbolt 3 provides:

At 40 Gbps, Thunderbolt 3 is the fastest connection available. By comparison, native USB 3.1 operates at 10 Gbps.

Thunderbolt 3 is bi-directional with four lanes of PCI Express Gen 3 and eight lanes of DisplayPort 1.2.

Now with a Thunderbolt 3 port, you can connect to any dock, device or display, including billions of USB devices.

Or, in a chart:

I was having a heck of a time finding USB-C hubs that would power two monitors, my USB 3.0 devices and also charge the device at the same time. And no wonder, because USB-C can’t support all of that. But Thunderbolt 3 can, and once I switched my search criteria, it turned out that I was just asking the wrong questions the whole time.

Turns out, Thunderbolt 3 allows you to power up to two monitors at 4K resolution, power all of your USB 3.0 devices, and charge the MacBook at the same time.

What’s more: for power-hungry power users like me, we can break the under-powered Apple video card out of its anodized prison by using an eGPU (external graphics processing unit), which powers as many monitors as it can support, while charging your computer, giving you USB 3.0 ports, and an ethernet port (on some models).

Cursory searches turn up a number of interesting solutions:

The first thing I noticed was that all of these were very pricey! Though if you actually need good graphics processing power, Apple supporting eGPUs unlocks a whole other world of possibility (at least we can actually upgrade something about these machines?).

The long and short of it is that I was (and I suspect many of you might be) asking the wrong question. Though the port looks like the USB-C we all have gotten accustomed to, it is actually Thunderbolt 3, which is a vastly, vastly, more capable technology than USB-C. Once I started searching for what is possible at my workstation using Thunderbolt 3, I found that I actually could reduce my need for iDongles down to a single hub, or a single eGPU.

Lots of folks are probably searching for the wrong solutions, like I was. Truly leveraging Thunderbolt 3 lets Mac users reduce the clutter and cut down to a single port for all needs, which is actually insanely cool, even if pricey.

You can avoid this pricey solution though. I was not previously aware of this, but it turns out that you can run external monitors through USB 3.0 ports connected to Thunderbolt. Check this out:

When you combine these USB to HDMI converters with a Thunderbolt 3.0 single port, power delivery adapter, you can power your machine, run multiple monitors, and all of your USB devices all at once through a single port.

TL;DR– by using StarTech USB HDMI adapters, I escaped iDongle hell and can power and drive all of my peripherals through a single Thunderbolt 3.0 port for a grand total cost of about ~$150 in third party peripherals (far less than Apple dongles)

As pro users, we are used to needing/using a new port for every single device we add to our machines, but especially to power external monitors. Thunderbolt 3.0 would be a single port to rule them all, if that’s all you had. But these machines have 1, 2, or 4 of them (1 if you only have that terrible MacBook Basic model). I suspect most of you, like me, were spending way too much money on adapters and using far too many ports. Apple has way under-sold Thunderbolt 3.0 and many power users would benefit from a fresh look this powerful tech, and how it might help with managing a cluttered desk.

Purchase list:
StarTech.com USB 3.0 to HDMI — $58 (x2)

USB 3.0 Hub — $12

Anbear USB C power delivery, USB 3.0 and HDMI — $21

(Originally posted on Medium Jan 25th, 2019)