TB Display as dock for MBA

I'm just waiting for my MBA 13" to arrive today. It will be replacing my MBP 15" 2011...

I ordered a USB Gigabit Ethernet dongle in advance, but looking at the Thunderbolt Display, it seems an ideal "dock" for the MBA - through the Thunderbolt cable, it then provides 3 USB ports and a Gigabit Ethernet port (plus the HD Facetime camera!).

I'm wondering if anyone has a TB Display yet with their MBA and their thoughts?

I guess eventually there will be plenty of standalone TB docks but in the meantime this seems like a very clean MBA dock solution?!

ZBoater said:

I'm waiting on one too. A USB gigabit dongle will be limited to USB speeds, so I just got the regular Apple one and use wireless N (300gb) at home while I wait on the TB displays to become available.

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In practice I suspect the USB Gigabit is still faster than Wifi-N (which I have), but like you I would prefer "full" Gigabit for transferring media to my NAS.

ZBoater said:

That's exactly the same reason I have. Last week I picked up my first NAS (Netgear ReadyNAS Duo) and connecting at gigabit makes a world of a difference.

The cabling in my house is 12 years old and most of it doesn't support gigabit. My Time Capsule unfortunately connects at only 100MB. As an access point it's fine, and I backup wirelessly now, but I'd also love for Time Machine to backup faster when I'm connected. I have to figure out how to run a new cable downstairs...

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I'm using a Time Cap as my NAS as well (well, technically a 2TB drive connected to my Time Cap). Although I use GB Ethernet most of the time for my MBP, I'd recommend you fiddle with the Time Capsule settings so that it's limited to 5Ghz band unless you still have 802.11g devices lying around. That should increase your Wi-fi connection speeds (depending of course on a million other factors like the building materials in your house!!!)