It’s not as versatile as many of the third-party options, but if you want something straight from Apple, it’s a good choice. It’s worth noting that Apple sells its own multi-port USB-C adapter for $60 with USB-C input, HDMI, and USB-A. Buy the VAVA USB-C Hub on Amazon for $59.99. While it’s not Thunderbolt 3-enabled, it’s an affordable, versatile, and well-reviewed USB-C hub that won’t take up too much extra space in your bag. This hub is able to achieve a relatively small footprint, while including HDMI, 3 USB-A ports, an SD card slot, a microSD card slot, USB-C, and 1Gbps Ethernet support. Our top pick is the 8-port VAVA USB-C Hub.
These hubs bring legacy ports to the MacBook Air, such as USB-A, HDMI, and more.įor the ultra-portable MacBook Air, you’re going to want something relatively small and easy to keep in your bag with you at all time. One of the most common accessories for USB-C and Thunderbolt 3-enabled Macs is a hub of some sort.
This is somewhat surprising seeing that the 12-inch MacBook features USB-C connectivity, but it is not a dual-port also capable of Thunderbolt 3.Īs we noted in our full MacBook lineup comparison, the 12-inch MacBook’s USB-C port maxes out a throughput of 5 Gbps, while the Retina MacBook Air’s Thunderbolt 3/USB-C port maxes out at 40 Gbps and supports USB 3.1 Gen 2, which enables speeds of up to 10 Gbps for non-Thunderbolt 3 accessories USB-C and Thunderbolt 3 Hubs One important thing to note right off the bat is that both USB-C ports on the new MacBook Air are also Thunderbolt 3 capable. Read on as we roundup some of the MacBook Air accessories with USB-C & Thunderbolt 3. While the transition to USB-C is bound to be bumpy for some MacBook Air users, it also opens the MacBook up to a host of new accessories and peripherals. As many anticipated, the new MacBook Air drops all of its legacy ports in favor of USB-C. PS: Normally applications use the Macintosh HD / Users / YOU / Library / Application Support / folder to write and read temporary files, thus it would make less sense to start applications from an external HDD (Firefox 11 is 80 MB in size, you would have to start it 52,428,800,000 times to fulfill 10,000 cycles on a 64 GB SSD - that is more than 52 billion times, 332 times per second over five years, SSDs can't even read that fast).Apple finally debuted its long-awaited new Retina MacBook Air last Tuesday. In other words, it is not necessary to do what you want to do just to save some write/read cycles (typically one cycle takes more than one day on a 64 GB SSD, even more than a week on bigger ones, unless you constantly write to it, in which case, moving Firefox or other applications onto an external HDD will not help anyway). Assuming those numbers vary and it would only be a tenth of that, it would still mean 35 GB per day, which under normal usage no average computer consumer does, not even with temporary files. Normally modern SSDs have a theoretical write/read limit of 10,000 to 100,000 cycles ( P/E cycles), meaning if you had a 64 GB SSD and its cycle limit would be 10,000, you would have to write 625 TB to it, which would be 351 GB per day everyday for the next five years.