I’m looking for a thunderbolt hub so I can easily use my new MacBook Pro as a desktop. I’ll be moving away from a 24-core xeon workstation, which I’ll keep headless and remote desktop to it if I do need its power. I’ve umpteen USB peripherals which can obviously go via a hub into the back of a thunderbolt hub.

The kicker is my two 27″ monitors. I know my MBP can handle them both via Thunderbolt. What I’m not sure of is whether both could go through a Thunderbolt hub, and also still be able to use the MBP’s screen at the same time.

Basically, I’m after being in a position where to leave for home, I unplug the magsafe and one thunderbolt cable, and walk out of the door. As a thunderbolt hub is not going to be cheap, I want to make sure I get this right!

I know of at least one person using two large monitors on their retina MBP. I see no reason it won’t work. Order the parts online and, if they don’t do the job, just send them back within a week.

Rachel

It’s a shame Apple don’t put two thunderbolt ports on their cinema displays so as you could daisy chain them.

Should be fine with a hub though.

I already have two nice 27″ Dell displays, so no need for new monitors.

Trouble with ordering online is that I’m in Oz, and laws about returns aren’t quite so nice here 🙁

Move to UK first, then. Will be cheaper than a thunderbolt cable, anyway.

Rachel

Well, it seems that there is no way to use both monitors through a thunderbolt hub at the same time, as none of the thunderbolt hubs offer multiple TB ports. This is very annoying, as having two displayport / dual link DVI monitors, there’s no pass-through, which means they take up the two TB ports, leaving me with none for anything else (such as GBit ethernet)

I don’t think it’s even possible to implement a thunderbolt hub based on the thunderbolt standards. Designed to be daisy chained and not split. Pretty poor that devices have an in and not an out.

If you don’t mind one desktop spread across two monitors then maybe this matrox thing if it supports the resolutions you want.

Yeah, I was looking at those, but they sound as shonky as hell, and with 2x 27″ that’s one hell of a pseudo-screen in terms of resolution that the display drivers might not like.

It seems the only way, in the absence of anything useful (like TB passthrough on DVI or ethernet adapters) is one of the very expensive docks AND still having multiple cables and adapters from the laptop. This really does defeat the object.

The only other option is 1x monitor via TB-displayport, 1x monitor via HDMI, and Gb ethernet via the final TB port. As I understand it however, I won’t get full resolution or have to suffer 30 fps refresh rate if I use a 27″ monitor off the MBPr’s native HDMI socket. Either that or just deal with 100 Mb ethernet via USB, which isn’t really suitable for some of the work I do (lots of remote desktop and big data shifting).

Apple – it just works 🙄

You could try an MST hub if it’s just for displays. Don’t know how well these work with Macs. You’d need Thunderbolt 2 for DisplayPort 1.2 I think. (Another one here.) Hang this off the back of a thunderbolt desktop dock thing maybe?

Edit: Blimey, 250 quid for Belkin’s Thunderbolt 2 desktop dock thing!

Apple – it just works

And it’s not really Apple. It’s Thunderbolt.

That MST thing might be worth a look, as my MBP does have TB2. No mention of Mac compatibility though, so will contact them and see

And it’s not really Apple. It’s Thunderbolt.

It might as well be Apple, as they pushed the standard for so long as being the answer to all the world’s connectivity problems (hence the magical shrinking form factors with a totally inadequate number of ports)

At least you could do it if you had monitors that supported a pass through. Wouldn’t even be possible with DisplayPort, HDMI, VGA, DVI, etc.

At least you could do it if you had monitors that supported a pass through. Wouldn’t even be possible with DisplayPort, HDMI, VGA, DVI, etc.

Meh. Apart from Apple’s now near-obsolete TB monitor, what else is there that is truly a TB monitor? Even if I used that as one of the monitors, it doesn’t pass through signal fir non-TB monitors, so it’s still effectively not passing through signal in a way that means it’s not the end of a chain.

At least the high-end Dell laptops at work have proper docking stations that allow you to run two monitors. I had hoped that one of these TB docks would do the same, but despite having 20 Gb of bandwidth to play with, it appears not. At that price, it’s very poor.

lacie, sonnet and caldigit do expansion solutions. quite like the look of the echo 15 so i can have blu-ray and another ssd scratch disk in one box.

as for ‘thunderbolt monitor’ surely they are more of a ‘displayport monitor’?

I have the same issue, 2 27″ TB monitors, one is daisy chained off the back of a Sonnet 10gbe pcie adapter. Annoys me slightly as it reduces my local traffic to 8.6gbps. I also use a HDMI TV and retina screen for some other stuff, the mac HW and drivers handle it fine.
Easiest way to do this is to make sure you get/use monitors which allow passthrough of video signals so you can use one output, the new Viewsonic VP2772 for example supports this mode – there are others, Im just partial to Viewsonic as they have great warranty / dead pixel policies on ‘pro’ models.

Pretty sure Mac’s won’t support the multi display MST for displayport – the easy way to do this would be to use a MST display port splitter out of a thunderbolt hub or one thunderbolt port but it won’t work with a Mac.

You’ll get screens to mirror, but not act independently. There was talk of adding MST support in Yosemite but seems it’s only added 4K not not the dual monitor support. Thunderbolt itself can’t be split, only chained.

The only way you can do what you’re trying to achieve is as you said above, use the belkin dock (or similar) to give you your gbethernet and display, and use the other tb port for your other display. Doesn’t give you 1 plug ease though. If you’re going to do that you may as well just have a regular usb 3.0 hub for peripherals and ethernet and keep the tb for displays as you’re plugging in 3 cables anyway!

Have you seen this though? http://zenboxx.com/
Not available yet, but if it gets to market mid next year it will do what you want, the retina version will give you gb ethernet and display port from the hub with a pass through for your second monitor, all with 1 plug simplicity. £100 though for a product you can’t have for 6 months…

Maybe one of the CNC wizards on here could CNC up a aluminium block to take all the wires to a dock so it’s one plug????

Have you tried PC World ?