LG UltraFine 4K as dock?

[spiderman0616]

Hi all--

Hoping this is an easy "yes!", but I want to walk you all through my thought process here and make sure I'm right, as I've never had a USB-C monitor before:

Long story short, I ordered the LG UltraFine 4K and it's arriving today. Before I tear my entire work space apart, I want to make sure I know how the new setup will work. What I currently do is leave my work MacBook Pro on my desk almost 100% of the time, and dock it via two StarTech dongles to my dual Dell DVI monitors. Because of the rat's nest of cabling and the way my desk needs to be set up, that's pretty much the way things stay. I never hook my personal Mac up to my workstation, because it's just too much of a pain in the butt to wrestle everything apart. What I'm hoping to do now that USB-C is involved is to just have the single LG monitor on my desk with one single USB-C cable as a connection. Ideally I would be able to hot swap out my work Intel Mac and my personal M1 Mac to connect to that monitor seamlessly with a quick connection of that one cable.

My assumptions are that:

1) Because the LG monitor provides a charge as well, it will be able to work in tandem with smart charging in macOS.
2) My Magic Keyboard and Magic Mouse need to be paired to both devices, and the LG monitor does nothing to facilitate that like a true dock would.

Are those assumptions correct? Does anyone else hot swap out Macs like this and have any advice for ideal setup?

Thanks!

 

[Hrhnick]

Hi all--

Hoping this is an easy "yes!", but I want to walk you all through my thought process here and make sure I'm right, as I've never had a USB-C monitor before:

Long story short, I ordered the LG UltraFine 4K and it's arriving today. Before I tear my entire work space apart, I want to make sure I know how the new setup will work. What I currently do is leave my work MacBook Pro on my desk almost 100% of the time, and dock it via two StarTech dongles to my dual Dell DVI monitors. Because of the rat's nest of cabling and the way my desk needs to be set up, that's pretty much the way things stay. I never hook my personal Mac up to my workstation, because it's just too much of a pain in the butt to wrestle everything apart. What I'm hoping to do now that USB-C is involved is to just have the single LG monitor on my desk with one single USB-C cable as a connection. Ideally I would be able to hot swap out my work Intel Mac and my personal M1 Mac to connect to that monitor seamlessly with a quick connection of that one cable.

My assumptions are that:

1) Because the LG monitor provides a charge as well, it will be able to work in tandem with smart charging in macOS.
2) My Magic Keyboard and Magic Mouse need to be paired to both devices, and the LG monitor does nothing to facilitate that like a true dock would.

Are those assumptions correct? Does anyone else hot swap out Macs like this and have any advice for ideal setup?

Thanks!

I think your best option would be to use a Logitech Keyboard and Mouse that connects over a dongle instead of Bluetooth. You can leave the dongle plugged into the LG monitor and it will hot swap between both your computers when you plug into the monitor. The Logitech MX series is popular with Mac users.

 

[spiderman0616]

I think your best option would be to use a Logitech Keyboard and Mouse that connects over a dongle instead of Bluetooth. You can leave the dongle plugged into the LG monitor and it will hot swap between both your computers when you plug into the monitor. The Logitech MX series is popular with Mac users.

Thanks for that suggestion--I'll definitely keep that on my list to possibly need to try after I get everything situated.

 

[spiderman0616]

Got the UltraFine monitor and Logitech gear yesterday and set it all up. I'm blown away. I finally have a desktop monitor that is at least sort of on par with my Apple screens. The USB-C passthrough eliminated so many cables. Even if I had bought two of these and had two monitors again, it would be a lot less messy in the way of cables.

The MX mouse works great with Spaces too. I have the little extra right and left click buttons set to switch desktops back and forth, and it's every bit as fast as looking back and forth between monitors.

I'm a happy camper!