OWC has announced that its upcoming Thunderbolt Hub will be compatible with all Apple M1 and Intel Macs equipped with Thunderbolt 3 ports and running macOS Big Sur, offering users the ability to expand the number of available Thunderbolt ports.
The OWC Thunderbolt Hub connects to a host computer over a Thunderbolt 3/4 port and provides three additional Thunderbolt ports (which are also compatible with USB-C) and one USB-A port. Each of the three downstream Thunderbolt ports can host its own daisy chain of peripherals and support transport speeds of up to 40Gb/s, subject to the overall limit of 40 Gb/s for the connection from the host computer.
The upstream Thunderbolt port can provide up to 60 watts of power to the host computer, which would be enough for a MacBook Air or a 13-inch MacBook Pro, but wouldn't be able to fully support a 16-inch MacBook Pro. The downstream ports can provide up to 15 watts for bus-powered Thunderbolt peripherals.
The OWC Thunderbolt Hub is priced at $149.99 and is available for pre-order now ahead of an early December launch.
Thursday August 20, 2026 8:00 am PDT by Joe Rossignol
Apple has yet to reveal when the iPhone 18 Pro and iPhone Ultra will be announced and released, but the dates usually follow a familiar pattern.
As usual, the iPhone event is expected to take place in the first half of September.
Labor Day falls on September 7 this year. The last time the holiday was on that day was in 2020, but the iPhone event that year was delayed until October due to...
Thursday August 20, 2026 2:19 pm PDT by Joe Rossignol
macOS 27 Golden Gate is not compatible with any Macs with Intel processors, marking the end of an era. The update, which is currently in beta ahead of a release later this year, is limited to Apple silicon Macs with an M1 chip or newer.
Last year, Apple said that macOS 26 Tahoe would be the final macOS release compatible with Intel-based Macs, so this was an expected development.
Intel...
Sunday August 23, 2026 11:19 am PDT by Tim Hardwick
Apple's upcoming foldable iPhone Ultra is winning over the few people who have had hands-on time with the device, though the camera setup may leave some users wanting, according to Bloomberg's Mark Gurman.
Writing in his latest Power On newsletter, Gurman says people who have used the device – which is reportedly referred to internally as the iPhone Ultra – like how it fits in your...
I'd consider myself a pro user, and I've been using a MacBook Air M1 with 8-core GPU and 16GB of RAM and couldn't be happier. A product like this that can add more Thunderbolt ports is the cherry on top.
The description references Thunderbolt 3 and the images are labeled with Thunderbolt 4.
Because electrically there is no difference between TB3 and TB4. TB4 is more of a certification, it requires full TB3 feature set in the host, along with secure memory access which wasn't present in older host controllers. They added hub support, but apparently there wasn't anything preventing it before in the protocol.
USB4 is largely based on Thunderbolt, however, there are material differences in regards to implementation (signaling rates, power delivery, etc.). Thunderbolt 3 interoperability is optional, not required, for USB4 hosts and devices.
Thunderbolt 4 is USB4 with mandatory Thunderbolt 3 interoperability along with a bunch of other minimum requirements to achieve certification. The Thunderbolt/USB4 ports on the M1 Macs are Thunderbolt 4 as far as signaling and power delivery are concerned. They do not meet the minimum requirement for video output because the M1 can only provide the Thunderbolt/USB4 host router with a single display stream. So aside from not supporting at least 2 displays, the USB Type-C ports on M1 Macs are otherwise Thunderbolt 4 compliant. This is not a deficiency in Apple's implementation of Thunderbolt/USB4, but rather in the display engine for the M1's GPU. Either port can drive a display, but not both at the same time.
The reason why Thunderbolt has historically been strictly a daisy-chain topology is that Intel never produced a Thunderbolt controller with more than 2 ports. You can't build a bigger switch/hub with only 2-port switches. That all changed when Intel recently released the 4-port JHL8440 "Goshen Ridge" ('https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/189982/intel-jhl8440-thunderbolt-4-controller.html') controller. OWC's device appears to be first to market and very reasonably priced, but I'm sure more vendors will soon follow.
I will never buy anything from OWC again. They have never sold me a good product. The SSD's are overpriced and slow compared to conventional SSD's (Which I found work perfectly with a simple pin adapter from Amazon). The Envoy SSD case for the Apple SSD is extremely unreliable in the three I've had to the point I just throw them away out of frustration. The last straw was when I bought a "genuine" MagSafe 2 power brick for my MBP, it caught fire 3 months later and when I opened it I found it was a counterfeit product.
Apple's first foldable iPhone, with a book-style design featuring a ~5.5-inch outer display and a ~7.8-inch inner display with a minimal crease down the middle.
