This is the device the piqued our curiosity. The lack of AC power doesn’t mean you can’t use devices like Universal Audio’s Arrow audio interface on your Thunderbolt 2 Mac. That is, to attach bus-powered T3 devices to a T1/2 Mac, you need a T3 dock. To attach bus-powered T1/2 devices to a T3 Mac, you need a T1/2 dock. Said dock needs to match the version of Thunderbolt (1/2 or 3) you want to use, but don’t have. The answer is of course, a powered Thunderbolt dock sitting on the end of the Apple adapter. Most articles I’ve seen online (unfortunately some of them mine) have intimated or flat out said this is simply the way things are, ignoring the easy if not particularly cheap solution.
The upshot being that any Thunderbolt device that provides its own power works with the adapter, while bus-power-only (no AC adapter) devices such as the aforementioned portable SSDs, audio interfaces, etc.
You can use a drive like LaCie’s fast Thunderbolt 2 Rugged SSD on your older Thunderbolt 1/2 Mac by employing a powered Thunderbolt 3 dock attached via Apple’s Thunderbolt adapter.įor some reason, none of the adapters-including Apple’s-deliver bus power to devices. Shown above, the Thunderbolt 3 (USB-C) to Thunderbolt 2 Adapter ($49) is the one you want. Thankfully Apple realized that users of older Macs might want to make use of newer Thunderbolt 3 devices and made their adapter bi-directional version-wise. Note that you may need a Thunderbolt 2 cable as well.
Avoid these.Īt the time of this writing, Apple’s Thunderbolt adapter was the only one available that allows you to sucessfully use Thunderbolt 3 devices to a Thunderbolt 2 port. Said presumptuous (penny-pinching?) design, was fine for that, but was generationally uni-directional, not allowing you to hook up Thunderbolt 3 devices to Thunderbolt 1/2 Macs. One of the cross-generational adapter designs that came out with the arrival of Thunderbolt 3 was apparently designed under the assumption that users would only want to connect their older Thunderbolt 2 devices to their new Thunderbolt 3 Mac. However, there’s always been an easy, albeit somewhat pricey and not particularly portable solution: a powered dock. That was a nice move actually, but while adapters for the still plentiful Thunderbolt 2 Macs and perhipherals arrived in short order, they didn’t support bus-power-only devices like all those sexy Thunderbolt portable SSDs I review for Macworld. Physically, err… Thunderbolt 3 ditched the previous generation’s mini-DisplayPort connector for the slimmer, trimmer, orientation-agnostic USB Type-C port. When Thunderbolt 3 arrived, it was touted as not only twice as fast as previous generations, but completely backwards compatible with Thunderbolt 1 and 2.