Hello all,
I apologize if this has been covered ad nauseam, but I'm about to receive my 14" MBP M1 Max and plan to use it as my main home and travel machine. I have a Pro Display XDR also and I would like to purchase a Thunderbolt dock to go with it. I need this mainly to plug in my external USB 3 HDD, my external speakers, an external microphone, and a label printer. Nothing too crazy. I'd love to be able to just plug in one cable to my MBP and just have everything work, but all the thunderbolt and connection speed limitations have my head spinning.
I've been looking at Thunderbolt docks, and I think I've narrowed it down to Anker, Caldigit, OWC, or the Razer dock. I'm leaning towards the Razer because it's in stock at Amazon and I can get it tomorrow. The OWC one won't be delivered until December unless I go with one of their older models. The Ankers seem to have questionable compatibility with M1 Macs, and the Caldigit doesn't have a headphone/speaker port.
My question is, what is the optimal way to connect everything? Is there enough bandwidth with the TB4 docks to plug the Pro Display into the dock (along with all my other peripherals), and just connect the dock to my MBP? Or should I plug the dock into the Pro Display and connect it directly to the MBP? Or should I plug the Display and Dock into separate ports at the same time? In that case, both would theoretically provide power to the MBP, correct? If so, should I be worried about there being too much voltage going to the machine? I guess the last possibility would be to just plug the display into the laptop and use the USB-C ports on the back of the display for my peripherals, but I'd need some kind of USB-A hub for this, and I worry about slow transfer speeds with my external drives.
Thanks for your help, and if you have a specific dock/hub recommendation for this use case, I'd love to hear it.
I apologize if this has been covered ad nauseam, but I'm about to receive my 14" MBP M1 Max and plan to use it as my main home and travel machine. I have a Pro Display XDR also and I would like to purchase a Thunderbolt dock to go with it. I need this mainly to plug in my external USB 3 HDD, my external speakers, an external microphone, and a label printer. Nothing too crazy. I'd love to be able to just plug in one cable to my MBP and just have everything work, but all the thunderbolt and connection speed limitations have my head spinning.
I've been looking at Thunderbolt docks, and I think I've narrowed it down to Anker, Caldigit, OWC, or the Razer dock. I'm leaning towards the Razer because it's in stock at Amazon and I can get it tomorrow. The OWC one won't be delivered until December unless I go with one of their older models. The Ankers seem to have questionable compatibility with M1 Macs, and the Caldigit doesn't have a headphone/speaker port.
My question is, what is the optimal way to connect everything? Is there enough bandwidth with the TB4 docks to plug the Pro Display into the dock (along with all my other peripherals), and just connect the dock to my MBP? Or should I plug the dock into the Pro Display and connect it directly to the MBP? Or should I plug the Display and Dock into separate ports at the same time? In that case, both would theoretically provide power to the MBP, correct? If so, should I be worried about there being too much voltage going to the machine? I guess the last possibility would be to just plug the display into the laptop and use the USB-C ports on the back of the display for my peripherals, but I'd need some kind of USB-A hub for this, and I worry about slow transfer speeds with my external drives.
Thanks for your help, and if you have a specific dock/hub recommendation for this use case, I'd love to hear it.
