What the heck is a thunderbolt port for?

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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.

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7 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

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.

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