The new M4 Pro Mac mini and new M4 Pro and M4 Max MacBook Pro feature Thunderbolt 5 ports for the first time. Thunderbolt 5 offers bi-directional transfer speeds up to 80Gb/s, or 2x faster than Thunderbolt 4. It can also drive high-resolution displays using a 120Gb/s bandwidth mode.
However, the universe of Thunderbolt 5 accessories is still nascent. OWC announced its first Thunderbolt 5 dock today, priced at $189.
This is only the second Thunderbolt 5 dock accessory on the market. The other one was launched last month by Kensington, the SD5000T5 docking station featuring a myriad of Thunderbolt 5 downstream ports as well as legacy IO like USB-A and a SD card reader.
The OWC dock is simpler, with the aim to turn a single Thunderbolt 5 port on your Mac into three downstream Thunderbolt 5 ports and one USB-A port. The dock allows users to connect their machine to up to three 8K monitors (using DisplayStream Compression), just by plugging in a single cable.
You could also connect super-fast external storage, and other Thunderbolt 5 accessories as they arrive on the market. The dock will also deliver up to 140 watts of power over the Thunderbolt 5 cable, so you can charge your connected MacBook Pro at full speed.
Thunderbolt 5 is fully backwards compatible, so you don’t have to worry about conflicting standards. Any older Thunderbolt or USB device running through a USB-C cable can be connected and it will work just fine, it will naturally just run at the slower speeds of the earlier generation standards.
The OWC dock can be pre-ordered now, with first deliveries arriving in December.
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