Thunderbolt to Gigabit Ethernet Adaptor

Reviews for Thunderbolt to Gigabit Ethernet Adaptor

Customer Reviews and Ratings

3.5 out of 5 stars

Based on 85 reviews

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  • 3.0 out of 5 stars

    Driver Issues

    • Written by from Auckland

    First off, this works GREAT on Mac OS X.
    However, when running bootcamp, the Driver has many issues.
    If it is unplugged, the computer must be restarted to connect again.
    Driver, for some reason disables the computers abilt to enter sleep mode, only hibernate and shutdown

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  • 1.0 out of 5 stars

    Hangs bootcamp Windows 7 on lid close

    • Written by from Brooklyn

    Thunderbolt Gigabit Ethernet Adaptor DOES work on Windows 7, but requires a reboot after you connect it. The problem I have every time I close/reopen the lid, bootcamp doesn't come out of sleep/hibernation and you have to reboot again.

    2 of 2 people found this useful

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  • 5.0 out of 5 stars

    Fully Functional

    • Written by from Dublin

    Works perfectly with the Macbook Air!

    0 of 1 people found this useful

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  • 1.0 out of 5 stars

    Loose thunderbolt ethernet adaptor after five months

    • Written by from greenbank

    I have been using the Thunderbolt ethernet adaptor for five months now. While it worked well till up to this week, the connection to the laptop is getting loose and I lose connection to the internet. This is very frustrating. I miss not having the ethernet port directly in my new laptop. The price for the adaptor is high, considering that it loosens up and behaves unpredictably. I may have to purchase a new one every six months. I will try the USB adaptor, since it is a little wider and hopefully more stable. I also do not like the length of the adaptor. If it is not supported by a table, it puts quite a torque on it. I wish that it was smaller and without any movable parts. I love my new retina display laptop and if this bit of an inconvenience was resolved, I would be thrilled.

    6 of 6 people found this useful

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  • 1.0 out of 5 stars

    Expensive and flawed

    • Written by from Roma

    I can understand the removal of ethernet ports if it was for reasons of size (since the Retina is quite thin and I'm not entirely sure Ethernet would fit too well), otherwise not a very good decision.
    That said the adaptor does what it's mean to do, but it has some major flaws.
    First of all, the price tag. After having purchased a rather expensive computer, having to throw in another 30 just to be able to go online isn't really ideal. They could've thrown one in for free, but I guess that's not how Apple rolls.
    The second problem is that, despite being light and portable to bring behind when out, the cable part of the adaptor is quite thick and not very flexible, which can be pretty annoying if you're trying to work in cramped spaces (or just don't have 15cm to the left of your laptop). The cable part can, obviously, be bent, but I wouldn't be surprised if it would soon destroy the adaptor. I try not bending it as much as possible, and having had it for just over 4 months I can see it's getting pretty ruined.
    But the last, and definitely most annoying problem, is that the adaptor does not fit snugly in the port and wobbles. The slightest twitch can cause your connection to drop, forcing you to disconnect and reconnect the cable for it to be recognized again.

    16 of 20 people found this useful

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  • 1.0 out of 5 stars

    This product Killed my MacBook Air

    • Written by from Dunstable

    I plugged it in and it froze my MacBook Air, on reboot my SSD drive was dead!! The Mac is now a Brick! Previously the Firewire Adaptor also froze the OS but I managed to recover the SSD that time with Disk Utility. I have posed this review a couple of days ago, but its been removed so here it is again.

    1 of 2 people found this useful

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  • 5.0 out of 5 stars

    Works fine on Mountain Lion and Win7 under Parallels

    • Written by from ORLANDO

    After reading some reviews here I was hesitant to get this. Some people had problems, especially when running Windows on their Mac. Fortunately, it worked fine for me, no hassles. I use a Retina MacBook Pro (mid-2012) running ML 10.8.3, and running Windows 7 under Parallels. No problems connecting to the Internet either on the Mac or the Windows side. Perhaps this was because, before plugging in the T-to-GE adapter for the very first time, I turned off my rMBP, inserted the adapter, then booted up. Maybe because it was in the system from the start, this worked better. Anyway, I had zero problems -- plus I like not having to take up a USB port.

    7 of 8 people found this useful

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  • 5.0 out of 5 stars

    Works perfectly

    • Written by from Wigan

    I bought this item for a MBA 13'' (Late 2012) . Upon plugging it into the MBA and network, it worked straight away . It is far quicker than wireless and in the few hours that I've used it non-stop it hasn't caused any problems . I consider this to have been an excellent purchase and well worth the £25 price tag .

    1 of 2 people found this useful

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  • 1.0 out of 5 stars

    Does not work with Windows 7 under Bootcamp

    • Written by from Bangkok

    Beware when buying this for use with Windows 7 running on Bootcamp - have tried fixes offered online and still does not work. Works fine under Mac OS.....

    Apparently the USB to ethernet works under Windows 7 on Bootcamp but only delivers 100Mbps

    8 of 10 people found this useful

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  • 1.0 out of 5 stars

    Does not work properly in Windows 8 with BootCamp 5

    • Written by from York

    Using this device in Windows 8 results in the Sleep States being disabled due to poorly written Apple Bootcamp Drivers. If you need this to work in Windows don't buy.

    6 of 8 people found this useful

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  • 5.0 out of 5 stars

    Thunderbolt to Ethernet Adaptor solved Roku and Apple TV ethernet access

    • Written by from San Jose

    Ok, this is not what most people buy the Apple Gigabit Ethernet Adaptor for, but if you travel with an Apple TV or Roku video streaming device and want to use it on the road this adapter along with your Mac solved my WiFi internet access issue.

    Apple TV and Roku don't have web browsers, so when you try to connect to the internet and need to click an ok or agree button to access the network these devices fail to login (all they can do is network name and password).

    If you use your MacBook to connect to WiFi and go to sharing in System Preferences you can choose to share your Ethernet over Thunderbolt. You can then plug in this adapter along with the Cat5e/6 ethernet cable to your Apple TV or Roku player and viola you can now use your device on any WiFi network that your Mac can log into, that your Apple TV or Roku couldn't. It is a great travel solution and a must carry adapter in my travel bag. Thank you Apple!

    10 of 13 people found this useful

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  • 1.0 out of 5 stars

    Defective Thunderbolt Ethernet adapter

    • Written by from Onex

    I purchase the adapter some 6 weeks ago. Everything was working fine although I can't really see a difference between my USB Ethernet adapter. This night it just stopped working. I though it might be the router or my network card but it's actually only the thunderbolt adapter which went defective. 6 week life cycle is a bit short... Not very happy with that... I have a D-Link power over ethernet switch behind my router. Could that explain the issue ?

    9 of 20 people found this useful

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  • 5.0 out of 5 stars

    Perfect

    • Written by from Drexel Hill

    Very good

    2 of 6 people found this useful

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  • 5.0 out of 5 stars

    Works Perfectly

    • Written by from Newcastle

    This works perfectly for me on mac, and on windows 7 via bootcamp. It provides full gigabit ethernet speeds, where as a usb adapter cannot.

    For everyone complaining, no one is forcing you to buy a retina MBP, Apple stills sells laptops with ethernet ports. If you haven't noticed, the retina models are simply too thin to fit an ethernet port. Buy the model that fits your needs.

    8 of 9 people found this useful

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  • 2.0 out of 5 stars

    Stops working after unplug,MacBook sleep and plug back

    • Written by from SARATOGA

    Bought the Gigabit Thunderbolt adapter a few days back. Using it in combination with a DVI to MiniDisplay port adapter. Using this to do a pseudo-docking station with a MacBook Pro retina 13" with the lid closed. Scenario is to get to my desk, plug power, DVI adapter and Gigabit adapter and get to work with a wireless keyboard and mouse. Problem is that very frequently, after the MacBook has been sleeping for a good while and I plug the DVI and Gigabit adapter the Gigabit adapter stops working after a little while or doesn't work to begin with and there is no amount of unplugging and plugging that will make it work again, only a full shutdown. Not sure if this is a bad interaction with the DVI adapter or not. Basically renders this product worthless.

    14 of 18 people found this useful

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  • 5.0 out of 5 stars

    It works.

    • Written by from Seattle

    Used with Macbook Air (2012). Does everything as advertised.

    5 of 6 people found this useful

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  • 5.0 out of 5 stars

    One Word-PERFECT!

    • Written by from Smithton

    Im not one to write reviews-but I think this product deserved one! I received it in the mail and was firstly taken back by its size! its so tiny! it suits my MacBookPro Retina perfect ally! the speeds achieved with this are amazing! I speed tested it with speedtest.net and compared with my my Lenovo R400 laptop both with gigabit connection over a Fibre NBN internet connection and the Mac was a full 20Mbps faster than the windows PC! But that was not really that surprising! :P One little feature I would love is hotplug compatibility in windows! I think all that would require is a driver tweak!
    All round great product! I would recommend for anyone who has recently acquired a MacBookPro Retina and needs a gigabit ethernet port!

    1 of 1 people found this useful

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  • 1.0 out of 5 stars

    1 step forward 2 steps back

    • Written by from Portland

    Well Apple has the amazing ability to ignore the little things.. And they did it again.

    Got a new Macbook pro with retina a few weeks ago, love the machine.. But,,,

    First,,, why did Apple take the network port out? REALLY?? The world is NOT wireless yet.. Right now us IT folk still dwell in the data center with lots Of wire, and most network switches, power strips printers etc need some direct connection attention once in a while..

    Second,,, The Lighting Bolt network adapter ,,, its NOT an adaptive port like the older model MacBook Pro's had. So if your business is working with hardware you get to carry a hub with you or a flipped ethernet cable.. BOOOOOO! They had it right then "fixed" it..

    Darnit...

    32 of 65 people found this useful

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  • 2.0 out of 5 stars

    Stopped working

    • Written by from Denver

    This adapter worked fine for a month on a Macbook Retina and then stopped working. Just died. Waste of money and lots of aggravation.

    11 of 14 people found this useful

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  • 5.0 out of 5 stars

    Excellent! Allows for two ethernet ports on a Mac Mini running Mac OS X!

    • Written by from Marysville

    I needed to set up my Mac Mini as a file server, connecting to an iSCSI RAID drive made by Drobo (a DroboPro to be precise). To do so, I needed to add another ethernet port to my Mini, so that I could have one port for connecting the Drobo, and one for talking to the network. To address this issue, I looked in to the Thunderbolt Ethernet adaptor from Apple. Unfortunately, no information that I could find would confirm that these adaptors would work with anything other than MacBook Airs. As such, I decided to take a chance, try it out on my Mini, and if it worked great, if not, I would return it.

    I purchased it and waited for it to arrive. Once it arrived, I immediately plugged it in to the Mini. Unfortunately, nothing changed in the Network Interface list in Network System Preferences...Darn - maybe it isn't supported....I thought. It also seemed very loose when plugged in to the port, much looser than a mini-display port adaptor. That seemed strange due to the fact that they were the same size plug.

    For the longest time, I couldn't realize why the Mac Mini would not recognize the presence of the adapter, while when used on my MacBook Pro it was recognized perfectly. Eventually, I placed a light back in the networking closet and realized that the adaptor wasn't pushed in all the way! Once I pushed in the adaptor all the way, it worked perfectly on my Mac Mini running Mac OS X 10.8. It was recognized instantly and the thunderbolt ethernet port automatically appeared in the network system preferences.

    I now have a connection to the Drobo RAID array that is at least 3x faster than before. This is a great little adaptor for use in Mac Mini computers running OS X.

    Highly Recommended, just make sure to push it in all the way, with a little more force than you might think is needed.

    10 of 12 people found this useful

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