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Comment by JosephRedfern | Hacker News Reader

It's a little janky (you have to boot to recovery mode), but you _kinda_ can with modern macs by using Target Disk Mode.

The drive appears as a network share, but it's not bidirectional, in that you can read/write from/to the target device, but the target device do the same to you.

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That's undershooting the possibility by a lot. If I plug two computers into each other via USB I would expect the OS on each to establish a network link at the best-available bandwidth.

That’s what already happens (at least with TB, USB 4?).

10 Gbps networking. Although it seems to have really high latency for whatever reason.

I'd like it to work USB 1.1 through 3.2, not just Thunderbolt. We have dual role, why aren't we using it? Host side thinks it's talking to a NIC, device side acts like a NIC.

On Mac, You can establish a thunderbolt-bridge network connection and then share files.

But it's not automatic. You gotta do it manually https://support.apple.com/guide/mac-help/ip-thunderbolt-conn....

I would have expected airdrop to automatically switch to thunderbolt if such a connection exists, but it doesn't.

Unless something has changed in recent macOS versions, by default:

1. Thunderbolt Bridge exists and is enabled.

2. All active (enabled, connected) interfaces get link-local IPv6 addresses.

3. All active interfaces without static or DHCP-assigned IPv4 addresses get link-local IPv4 addresses.

3. Multicast DNS (Bonjour) is enabled.

So basic networking should be automatic, though no file sharing services are enabled by default.

That's great! I wonder when they will automatically switch Airdrop over to thunderbolt when one is available.

I'd like to do this with actual universal serial bus (USB), not peripheral component interconnect express (PCIe) on a universal serial bus connector.

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