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Comment by benfrain | Hacker News Reader

Amazing, like MagSafe again. I'm thinking that may be the way forward to avoid a KVM.

With TB — can you literally just unplug from one Laptop/PC and connect to another and everything is back up and running on the 2nd computer?

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Yes, that is the primary motivation/intent of The type C connector and USB-C/TB.

It’s still early days so compatibility isn’t super yet, as this discussion shows. Also, being USB, there are many possible subsets and no such thing as a “universal cable”. The silicon is still immature and the analog issues are fiendishly complex.

The cheapo vendors will implement the minimal standard (or less). The higher end devices will be more compliant, but bugs remain (as I said, still early days).

But last year I switched to buying type C devices whenever I had the choice (even electric toothbrush) and so far it’s been fine.

The one thing I would say about he magnetic connection is that it works great when its sitting on your desk but not an ideal solution if you want to have the laptop in your lap; the magnet isn't strong enough for a lot of wiggling around. Not a real issue anyway since most TB3 cables are 1M or less so you're forced to have your laptop on a desk anyway.

Yep! As long as each PC is setup with all the necessary drivers and such its all plug and play. No issues with just ripping the cable out of my MacBook without "undocking" anything. It just reverts to the internal display without issues.

I kind of wish there were manual/dumb TB3 switches for this sort of thing but I have not seen any.

Fantastic, thanks for the clarification. I'll be swapping Macbook Pro (work) for Mac Mini (personal) so this could be the way forward. Thanks.

If you are getting one of the new M1 based mac minis, eGPU doesn't work.

One more question — those magnetic connections, can it connect both ways? What I mean it, cable running away in either direction or is it orientation specific?

Just tested for you. Yep! It works plugged in either direction.

You're not ejecting the external SSD before disconnecting?

I have a TB2 dock which I connect to using Apple's TB3 to TB2 adapter. I keep my Time Machine backup drive connected to the dock (along with 4K monitor, keyboard, mouse, and speakers). If I don't eject the drive before disconnecting from the dock, macOS complains about disconnecting the drive without ejecting it first.

Yeah. This is probably not the best thing to do and I do get the warning about not having disconnected the gpu and ssd properly but Ive never once experienced an actual problem from doing so (hundreds of times). No corrupted data or anything. But the SSD is mainly for photos/videos not time machine backups.

Check out Jettison.

Nice. Thanks!

I ended up buying Jettison (https://stclairsoft.com/Jettison/) to handle auto ejecting on sleep and remounting on wake (in particular, I have a PCIe SSD in my Mac Pro which macOS considers an external drive, rightly so, but still).

How is this not built into macOS already? It's literally "on sleep, flush and unmount".

I do this between my Thinkpad (work) and XPS (personal) laptops. Takes only a few seconds to unplug the cable from from one, and plug in the other, with all peripherals working. IOW, there's no Apple magic here, standards are pretty cool.

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