OWC’s Thunderbolt 4 dock caters to the lack of ports of new laptops

This story is part of CES, where our editors will bring you the latest news and the most popular articles from the all-virtual CES 2021.

If you have a newer laptop that does not have as many ports as you would like, peripherals Other World Computing has a new Thunderbolt 4 Dock which may interest you to include things like storage devices, network cables, headphones and external monitors. The $ 249 dock works with Macs on Apple’s new Big Sur operating system and Windows laptops powered by Intel’s 11th generation Core processors (named Tiger Lake) – the only laptops to power the new Thunderbolt 4- version of Intel’s fast connectivity technology supported. .

Docks are handy if you want to connect your laptop to a bunch of devices when you get to work or a home office. A single cable connected in a single laptop port offers a wide range of devices.

One major improvement with Thunderbolt 4 is that you can now connect multiple Thunderbolt devices in one hub instead of just one. OWC’s new Thunderbolt Dock has three Thunderbolt ports, and you can also connect USB-C devices to it. Thunderbolt 4 should also work more reliably on Windows laptops, but the top speed of 40 gigabits per second is unchanged from Thunderbolt 3.

OWC’s new Thunderbolt Dock, announced at this year’s online CES, has the following: three Thunderbolt 4 ports that also accept USB-C devices; a fourth Thunderbolt port that connects to the computer and provides up to 90 watts of charging power; one old USB-A port running at relatively slow USB 2 speeds, good for devices like keyboards; three USB-A ports that work at 10 Gbps speeds faster; a gigabit Ethernet port; an SD card slot; and one 3.5 mm audio port for headphones or microphones.

Each Thunderbolt port on the dock can handle up to two 4K screens or on 8K screen.

Other OWC devices at CES 2021

OWC also announced several other products at CES:

The Envoy Pro FX rugged external hard drive, available in sizes from 240 GB to 2 TB, is plugged into the USB-A, USB-C and Thunderbolt ports. It will be available in January. The cost is $ 169 for 240 GB, $ 199 for 480 GB, $ 299 for 1 TB and $ 479 for 2 TB. The drives are dust and water resistant and can transmit data at 2,800 megabytes per second.

The $ 65 USB-C Travel Dock E has two 3.2 Gbps USB-A ports, one HDMI 2.0 port, an SD card reader, a Gigabit Ethernet port, and a USB-C port to connect the power adapter of your laptop. It will be available before the end of March.

The U2 Shuttle, 3.5-inch disk drive that accommodates up to four NVMe M.2 memory-based SSDs. The four storage modules can be connected as RAID devices for better data protection. The $ 149 U2 Shuttle, available in January, can be connected to computers with a U.2 port and to some OWC storage devices.