OWC has just announced their new OWC Thunderbolt 5 Dock, adding up to 11 ports of I/O expansion for your M4 MacBook Pro with M4 Pro or M4 Max, which was the first Apple laptop to feature the latest generation of Thunderbolt port. It joins the likes of the Anker Prime Docking Station and the CalDigit E5 in the market. The OWC dock is set to start shipping in July.
Thunderbolt 5 enables higher bandwidth, which allows the OWC dock to sport three daisy-chained Thunderbolt 5 ports, as well as power things like 2.5Gb/s Ethernet, and feed multiple high-res external displays.
If you have a Thunderbolt dock already, you probably don’t need to rush to replace it with a Thunderbolt 5 one until you have more Thunderbolt 5 accessories to plug into it.
A big draw of the newly announced OWC dock is the inclusion of three TB5 ports, so you could connect super-fast storage arrays, for instance. In theory, you can unlock maximum throughput of 80Gb/s data transfer speed and 120Gb/s for display bandwidth.
But if you don’t have TB5 storage devices or other accessories, then you won’t gain additional performance here.
Of course, it is still backwards compatible with slower-speed accessories, you just don’t benefit from any of the extra available bandwidth.
In total, the 11 ports on the dock allow connectivity of up to three USB-C (Thunderbolt 5) devices, two USB-A (10Gb/s), one USB-A (5Gb/s), 2.5G Ethernet, microSD and SD UHS-II card reader, and a 3.5mm audio jack. The dock will also send power to the connected Mac at up to 140 watts, so you can charge your battery and connect all your displays and accessories with a just single cable.
The OWC Thunderbolt 5 Dock is set to ship in July, with a price of $329. Find out more here. It sits above OWC’s other Thunderbolt 5 hub accessory in the product range, that is, the lower-end OWC Thunderbolt 5 Hub.
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