Note 2: Apple may sometimes have additional support for certain USB Ethernet controllers via add-on drivers such as AppleUSBRealtek8153Patcher.kextįinally the most noticeable issue with USB NICs is that they share bandwidth with the rest of your USB devices on the same controller.

Note 1: Not all USB Ethernet devices are supported in macOS (namely AX88179) however the vast majority are thanks to this generic driver struture.

Compare this to USB, much of the compute task is still on the CPU side. As of Monterey, the following are supported:Īdditionally PCIe NICs generally offload much of the compute task from the CPU onto the on-board controller, giving your system some headroom during bandwidth intensive tasks. Whereas with USB, Apple writes semi-generic drivers based off USB CDC (Controller Device Class). With macOS, Apple generally prioritizes PCIe devices over USB for better driver support as drivers are written explicitly for them (see next section). Unfortunately it’s been a bit difficult to find much information on the parts used in many docks, thus I’ve decided to document my research on Ethernet controllers built into many Thunderbolt docks, with the goal of easily finding docks that use PCIe Ethernet. So with the purchase of a 14” MacBook Pro, I’ve been in the market to buy a Thunderbolt dock to live to 1 cable life style.

Mac ethernet to thunderbolt