I have a thunderbolt port on my laptop. I’ve tried to look up what it is used for, watched some videos, but I’m still confused. Can I use it to power my laptop? Does it transfer stuff faster? Do I need a special cord? Can I plug that cord into something normal? Explain it to me like I’m five please.
In: Technology
High speed data transfer beyond USB speeds when used with another thunderbolt device and a compatible cable.
Or at least more commonly in my case, using the displayport mode to connect a monitor, or just as an ordinary USB port.
Think of it this way: A thunderbolt port is essentially a PCIe slot on a cable. It has native access to the PCIe bus in ways that even high-speed USB doesn’t have.
Any regular PCIe device in an external enclosure can be connected via Thunderbolt and function identically as though it were inserted directly into a slot on your motherboard.
Additionally, per the Thunderbolt spec, every Thunderbolt port is also a USB port and a Display Port as well, so yes, you can charge your laptop through it.
Thunderbolt is a protocol. It uses a USB-C connector. Thunderbolt is a language, whereas USB-C is your voice box. There are other languages which use USB-C, such as USB4.
Thunderbolt is intended to be the one cable to rule them all. One cable can power your laptop, send video and audio to an external display and give you a high speed connection to an external hard drive or any other peripheral. It also lets you plug devices into each other instead of having one cable per device. 10 years ago when I was at my desk I had to plug in a power cable, a video cable an Ethernet cable and a usb hub for my keyboard, mouse and external hard drive. Today I plug in a single thunderbolt cable.
This is obviously more than the average consumer needs, which leads to another nice feature, it’s the same connector as usb c. This means that cheap devices with no need for all the fancy features are still compatible with thunderbolt. Your laptop doesn’t need a bunch of different plugs anymore, all you need is thunderbolt and you can use any device.
Well… any device once you make the leap to all usb c or thunderbolt devices, until then you’ll be using adapters and wondering how this is progress.
Thunderbolt is for apple monitors and it doubles as whichever port it has the same shape as (which varies by version of thunderbolt)
Thunderbolt is a standard, rather than a connector. At the moment, most Thunderbolt ports are USB-C, and can be used to interface with things like eGPUs and other devices. Depending on the laptop, you may be able to charge from it, and you can use regular USB-C devices with it aswell.
Thunderbolt is/was an alternative to USB – though the standards have somewhat converged. Most modern Thunderbolt ports can also be used as USB ports, but they support a faster transfer mode for specific applications. However, you should be prepared to pay a premium for Thunderbold devices and thus they are more used in professional or at least semi-professional environments – so in short: if you don’t know what it is, you probably don’t really need it.
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