Reviews for Thunderbolt to Gigabit Ethernet Adaptor

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.

5 of 5 people found this useful

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

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 12 people found this useful

Very good

2 of 6 people found this useful

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

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

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

At first I was hesitant based on the reviews but now that I've been using it for a month I couldn't be more happy. Backing up my 13"MBPr to a Network Attached Storage (NAS) device are so incredible fast compared to wifi. I do have a gigabit network setup. Moving large files or completed back-ups that used to take hours are now less than an hour.

11 of 11 people found this useful

Speed was fine. I used it constantly because we have no wifi here, and after the first time I unplugged it, I got a DNS error. Some random rebooting and unplugging fixed it, but after unplugging it a second time the same thing happened and nothing I've tried has fixed it. Looking around the internet, other people with mid-2012 macbook airs seem to be having the same problem with it. Fix this apple!

9 of 12 people found this useful

To everyone complaining about this not working in Windows... That's obvious. Apple builds its hardware to work with its own OS not windows. If you want to use accessories with Windows than make sure they are compatible with windows.

15 of 39 people found this useful