USB Hubs For Mac Explained: Don't WASTE your MONEY!

hey everyone kyle erickson here if you own a modern apple computer whether it be a macbook or a desktop machine like a mac mini there's a good chance you've had pain points with either the lack of ports or difficulty accessing them an easy way to address this is to pick up a usb hub but it's easy to get decision paralysis when you're shopping for these there's a bunch of things to consider like usb transfer speeds and versions and on top of that if you want your hub to do things like read sd cards power your laptop or run an external monitor things get even more complicated recently i went in trying to find the best usb hub for my workflow and one thing that i noticed right away a lot of them are overpriced underpowered or frankly just junk it took me forever to actually choose a hub with everything that i wanted and find something that was the most suitable for me so my goal with this video is to really break down not only what to look out for when shopping for a usb hub depending on your needs but i've also went out and bought a bunch of different hubs and tested them out and i have a few recommendations that i'll mention and leave links for in the description all at different price points and performance levels what i want to do here is split these hubs into three different categories low end mid tier and high end all based on price and what they offer and i will dive into what all these different specs mean along the way to help you understand if they really matter to you or not all the options i'm going to suggest will plug into your machine via usbc because that is the most common and usually the only port available to plug into your mech at least on a modern macbook let's begin with the low end category your non-powered usb hub this is typically what you're going to use for things like running flash drives keyboards a really low powered accessories you won't be able to run external drives or anything that takes moderate to high power because it's only powered from your machine's usb part and they're just not made to handle higher draw accessories that is going to limit what you're able to use these for in a lot of cases and it's also where in my opinion you're gonna find the most junk you can definitely find lots and lots of these out there for dirt cheap but one thing that you may notice is many of them are usb 2.0 meaning that you're going to get slow transfer speeds of 480 megabits per second that equates to a highest possible speed of 60 megabytes per second so not the greatest what i would recommend here is making sure you have at least usb 3.0 transfer speeds which will give you a theoretical five gigabits per second which is equal to about 625 megabytes so about 10 times faster than usb 2.0 if you're looking for a super basic hub like this this you green hub goes for about 11 to 14 bucks the nice thing about this one it's obviously cheap but it also has an input on the other end if you ever want to power this with a wall charger and that way you can effectively power more accessories from this ugreen does make pretty good stuff from what i've seen i've had little hubs like this use their cables and it's all been pretty good quality this hub in particular has fantastic ratings so as far as your cheapest options go i would say that this would probably be one of the best out there moving up into the mid tier category you'll find a bit more expensive options that are usually passive power or pass-through power charging hubs this is where you sort of get into this broad range of features and ports outside of just usb pass-through power works by taking the power from your macbook or your laptop charger and plugging it into the hub and the hub will not only be powered by that wall charger but it will carry the power back to your laptop as well via a usbc cable so you can basically have a powered hub without the need to have a separate power adapter you can run all your accessories like external hard drives charge your phone and all that good stuff what i'd caution here is to not buy the cheapest option out there especially when you're delivering power to something like a laptop or a phone there's loads of articles and posts out there about usbc cables and hubs ruining people's machines largely due to poor insulation build materials and quality control and i've personally had this happen to me where a super cheap pass through powerhub destroyed one of my macbooks you'll likely want to take note of the wattage available for power delivery some cheaper options may not power your macbook or your laptop or may not charge it as fast so i usually like to make sure that i stay above 50 watts or so for smaller machines and about 85 to 100 on larger ones outside of the power there's a whole host of features and specs to consider with these hubs you can certainly just go for usb a and usb usbc ports if that's all that you want but you do have some expanded options there as well as i mentioned before at bare minimum you probably want to have usb 3 ports available but you can also have usb 3.1 and 3.2 with gen2 and gen 2x2 and if all that sounds confusing well that's because it is the people who decide on usb versioning have changed these version names and what they mean at different points in time even for the older usb versions you can kind of think of it as if you bought an iphone 13 and two years from now apple decided to switch the iphone 13 to an iphone 13.2 so you'll find tons of packaging and marketing material that have old versions and new versions and have them all mixed together the easiest way to go about this is just to ignore those version numbers and just look directly at the transfer speeds again five gigabits per second is going to be your base transfer speed for usb 3 and then you'll move up to 10 gigabits per second and in some rare cases 20 gigabits just a note there though apple does not support the version at 20 gigabits per second so it will effectively run at 10. lots of folks want 10 gigabit transfer speeds when they want to use an external drive like this sandisk one that i have here or they're transferring large files from one device through their hub to a mac so if you plan on doing something like that as long as the drive supports those same speeds this is a great feature to look for usb ports are usually just one aspect of these products and more often than not we're looking for more out of these mid-range hubs like sd card readers and monitor outputs like displayport and hdmi for display output i like to make sure that there is decent support for whatever monitor that i have if you're just using a 1080p monitor there's not much of a worry but if you've got a 4k screen you'll likely want something that supports 60 hertz refresh rates there's a ton of hubs that only support 30 hertz refresh rates at 4k which honestly is not great with most 4k displays these days the native refresh rate will be 60 hertz and anything less than that will probably look pretty janky or choppy speaking to sd ports you might not ever use sd or micro sd card so it would be completely understandable that you don't care about them at all but for anyone with a camera or a drone or something like a raspberry pi these can be a necessity sd card readers have their own versioning as well and there are still a few hubs out there that run version 2.0 which has 25 megabytes per second transfer speeds not the fastest but version 3 or uhs1 readers will go up to 104 megabytes per second and they're the most common in these types of hubs that might seem slow but just keep in mind that sd cards in general are pretty slow just due to the nature of their size in rare instances you can find products that have readers with uhs 2 or version 4.0 support which will go up to 985 megabytes per second but you usually see those in more expensive docks which i will touch on in a bit but often your best bet there if you want uh s2 speeds is just to grab a 10 to 20 dollar reader like the one that i have here which is the kingston mobile light plus uh s2 sd card reader if you're transferring large files like 4k video from your camera uh s2 can be handy but if you're just moving over photos uh s1 is still going to be fine beyond that you might look at a few other things like ethernet ports if you want to physically plug in your machine to a wired network instead of using wi-fi or maybe you want a headphone jack if yours isn't easily accessible my favorite hub in this group is the anker power expand 8 and 1 usb hub you've got a bunch of the things that i just mentioned 10 gigabits per second transfer speeds on the usb ports an sd and micro sd card reader ethernet input for a wired connection and an hdmi output capable of 4k at 60 hertz the power delivery on this hub is up to 100 watts so it will cover any macbook's power requirements and the quality of this hub is fantastic this model starts at 79 so it's not the cheapest but for what it gives you in terms of features and reliability i think it's worth it anker does offer some other variants of this if you want less or more features or speeds in your hub at varying price points the next step up from this style of hub is when you get into the really high end category this is when you start looking at using your mac to its full potential in regards to ports most new macs support thunderbolt 3 and usb4 which produce extremely high transfer speeds the hubs or docks in this range can usually go from just under 200 up to 400 or more again that all depends on what you want for specs and features with thunderbolt 3 or usb4 you're looking at transfer speeds of 40 gigabits per second so it's incredibly fast where if you've got a device that supports either one of those protocols similar to the external drive that i have here maybe just as performant or more than your internal one in some cases for me i'm often using this drive for video editing and in situations where i need a really performant connection so that i don't have any bottlenecks in my workflow because i'm using a macbook in clamshell mode at my desk basically just like a desktop machine a dock makes much more sense than just a smaller usb hub these usually have their own power source and in a lot of cases also have power delivery so you no longer need a macbook charger and you could just use a usbc cable and just power this directly from the hub alone docking stations will normally have more ports available than hubs as well for me the most important thing when looking for a dock was thunderbolt 3 or usb4 and i wanted multiple ports as well that would support 10 gigabits per second transfer speed so i settled on this oracle thunderbolt dock it has power delivery on both of the thunderbolt connections at the back so i've got one of those powering my mac and the other one hooked up to my external ssd it's got a displayport connector at the back that i'm using to power my 4k display and a sd card reader at the front to transfer over my photos and my videos and it works great for me and it's relatively affordable as well sitting just under 200. if something like that isn't good enough for you and you're looking for the cream of the crop for docks and really looking to future proof your setup probably look at the razer thunderbolt 4 dock full disclosure i don't have one of these personally but i know some folks who do and i asked them a bunch of questions in preparation for this video and the response that i've got is resoundingly positive i know people who have been looking to power multiple high-res displays with the dock and this was the only hub that actually worked properly for them for that use case on top of that you have four thunderbolt 4 ports three usb a ports with 10 gigabit transfer speeds and a uh s2 sd card reader coming in at 329 which i know is expensive but probably worth it if you want a premium dock with any of these options i think that the most important thing that you can do is just sit down and figure out what you actually want to use a hub or a dock for if you want to make any compromises anywhere or if you want to go all out on a specific feature and pick up something that is going to satisfy those needs that way you're not cheating yourself by either cheaping out and getting something that you aren't happy with or spending too much on something that you don't need also don't go out there and buy junk or the cheapest option available there are just too many risks associated with it and i don't want to see anyone's machines get ruined or be stuck with something that you aren't happy with i know there is a lot to choose from out there and i hope that in some shape or form this video has helped you but if you do have any questions or comments for me please drop those down below and i'll do my best to respond as always if you enjoyed this video please push on that like button if you want to see more tech related content or if you'd like to go on a quest with me around the world to discover earth's greatest secrets only to be kidnapped and taken into a remote tribe of people where we live out our remaining days in mystery please subscribe thank you so much for watching and i will see you in the next upload [Music] you

Channel: Kyle Erickson

Views: 712,149

Keywords: usb c hub, usb hub, best usb hub, best usb hub for mac, best usb c hub, mac usb hub, usb hub for apple, best macbook accessories, macbook accessories, macbook pro accessories, best usb hub for macbook, m1 mac mini, m1 mac mini accessories, mac mini accessories, macbook air m2, m2 macbook air, best mac accessories, anker 555, anker, anker powerexpand, anker powerexpand 8-in-1, usb, orico thunderbolt dock, ugreen, ugreen usb hub, razer thunderbolt 4 dock

Id: Od_Hj4Su7dM

Length: 13min 24sec (804 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 23 2022