Hi, I'm Bernie Thompson. I'm the founder of Plugable
Technologies. So it's been six years since USB-C products and
laptops started coming onto the market, starting with the
MacBook that had a single USB-C port on the side of it back in
2015.
Well, things have progressed since then. We've gone from
USB-C by itself to Thunderbolt 3.
And now we're on the cusp of Thunderbolt 4 and USB4
generation of products.
Another thing that we're just right on the edge of is a
transition where you can really have a setup that has all these
small, very flexible USB-C ports without compromises.
Even though your laptop might've had USB-C, you really needed a
lot of converters, adapters, dongles, docks to connect with
all the other different port types. Well, USB-C is getting
more mature and there are options available to enable you
to get more ports, more USB-C ports, uh, than what your laptop
might have by itself. And so I'm excited to announce today the
Plugable TBT3-HUB3C.
So what's special about this?
Well, number one, it's all, USB-C, you're just a pure USB-C
hub, no other ports mixed in. So if you're looking to create an
ecosystem around your laptop, uh, and have it all be USB-C,
uh, this is the hub for you. Number two, for the first time
this year, it is possible to have a USB hub like this, where
every single USB-C port has as much capability as the other.
There's no special purpose ports.
It's been very common over the last five years to have
certainly hubs and docks and even laptops where you've got
USB-C ports and they look the same, but actually they don't
have the same functionality.
This new Plugable hub has the same functionality on every
port. So here I am, I've got a, uh, apple MacBook and it's
plugged into a monitor that is USB-C native. So just a single
cable, uh, from the MacBook to the Plugable hub. And over that
cable, it is charging the MacBook and any of the recent,
MacBook M1's. For example, there's plenty of, USB-C power
delivery, in order to fully charge your MacBook and also
connected off that same hub is the monitor. And again, this is
a monitor that natively supports USB-C.
Also very exciting. This hub supports all the latest USB
standards, and that includes Thunderbolt 4, USB4, Thunderbolt
3 and USB-C. So there's been this kind of confusing evolution
of USB standards, uh, over the last five years. And each of
those are kind of generations, uh, of the same technology
building on each other.
So if I want to plug in a Thunderbolt 3 device, it works.
If I want to plug in a USB-C display port device, like this
monitor here, it works. If I want to plug in a classic USB
dock, for example, our Plugable UD3900H dock, which comes with a
USB-C cable.
But it doesn't charge the laptop on its own. You plug it into
this hub and you will get all the functionality of that
Plugable USB dock, in addition to all the functionality of this
hub, including charging the laptop.
If this were an M1 Mac system here, the M1 actually only
supports one native display through USB or Thunderbolt.
But there's a technology called DisplayLink that operates over
USB, that you can get additional virtual displays, so that a
Plugable UD3900H Docking Station that I mentioned, you plug that
in through this dock.
Not only can you get the single display connected natively, you
can also get the extra one and two displays that are on that
plugable dock for a total of three external displays on your
Mac,
There's no other way to do that on a M1 MacBook system, um,
without something like a DisplayLink technology.
What happens if you don't have a pure, a USB-C setup yet, you
know, you're headed in that direction. This is an awesome,
uh, little hub that really takes advantage of, of everything that
USB-C has to offer, but your monitor is just an HDMI monitor.
Well, we include in the box a USB-C to HDMI adapter that works
with our hub.
So you can get that HDMI monitor attached, through the hub. And
if you've got a, um, Intel MacBook, or you've got a
Thunderbolt 4 Windows system, uh, to use with the hub, um, you
can buy a second, one of the same adapter from us, um, and
connect a second display in those cases, but not the M1 Case
because with M1, you need to switch to a different technology
because natively, it only supports a single display.
Compatibility on these exciting new Thunderbolt, four hubs is
really good on Mac. How's the compatibility on windows.
It's a little bit of a more complicated story. You basically
want a window system that advertises Thunderbolt 4, or USB
4 compatibility.
And the reason is, is there's a lot of older windows systems
that have USB-C or even Thunderbolt 3, and they're
capable of being compatible with these newer devices, but they
need software updates. And right now that's still uneven. We're
still kind of in the early days of that. So for the moment,
we're not recommending these Thunderbolt 4 hubs, uh, like
this Plugable one, uh, for those sorts of older windows systems,
you want to look for one where the windows system itself says
it's USB4 or Thunderbolt 4, and those ones will be good.
So what if we want to connect a, um, you know, a keyboard to this
or a mouse? Well, we have the Plugable USBC-AF3, They're a
little adapter that connects into a USB-C port and exposes a
classic, USB port, the kind that we've had for years.
Can kind of see here with the, vulnerable, for cable that comes
with the Plugable hub,
How much of a distance you can get, uh, between the laptop and
the hub.
We could stretch this out a little bit more,
But basically we include a 0.8 meter, Thunderbolt cable in the
box.
That's actually really long for a Thunderbolt cable. Thunderbolt
is a 40 gigabit per second standard, which is how you can
do so much cool stuff. Um, but, uh, that means that the cables
and cable quality are huge issue. You've got to get a
trusted name brand like lovable in order to, for that to work
and all of the, the kind of random cables that you have
laying around and bins, you know, for all your different
devices, chances are, they're not going to work with any kind
of thunder bolt or USB for device because the cables either
are completely lacking. Some of the functionality that's needed
in the cable or the quality isn't quite there. So we include
a high quality certified 0.8 meter cable in the box.
And, along with, uh, the Thunderbolt 4 hub that we're
launching here, we also have a new line of Thunderball for
cables, including this 1 Meter cable and 2 meter cable options,
So 1 Meter is just the longer version of exactly the same kind
of cable that's bundled with the dock. And then the 2 meters kind
of exciting, a little bit different. That's an active
cable.
Um, there's actually, uh, additional circuitry in there in
order to, uh, repeat the signal and achieve that super high 40
gigabit per second, uh, performance over that long, uh,
2 meter distance. So you'll notice a big kind of price jump
with the 2 meter cable, because there's a lot more going on
there, but really exciting because, you know, you can
create a great desk set up with all of these devices connected
and really be able to position things anywhere you want, uh,
when you have, uh, 2 meters of cable to work with.
So there you go, finally, USB-C, you can have a pure set up and
truly adopt USB-C across the board. You know, your MacBook
already is beautiful and thin and just has those USB-C ports.
And now, uh, the hub that charges your MacBook and gives
you that extra conductivity can be beautiful and thin and
perfectly matched your MacBook. Uh, and all of it is the same
technology USB-C, uh, with a mix of kind of low end USB-C
devices. High-end Thunderbolt 4 devices and everything in
between because it'll all work.
So thanks so much for watching. We're Plugable, we're a US
company. Our whole support team is here in the US right in
Redmond, Washington, just down the hill from Microsoft, we've
been around for over 10 years, a leader in laptop docking
stations.
And so if you have any questions at all about kind of the
compatibility or the technology or anything, our team here would
love to be able to answer them. And you'll be able to find a lot
of great information online in English, written out at length,
along with lots of videos like this, to help you make the most
of all of your plugable products. So thanks for
watching.