Belkin's Thunderbolt 3 Dock Core gives your Mac HDMI, Ethernet, and more

Belkin Dock Core dock (Image credit: Belkin)

What you need to know

The Belkin Thunderbolt 3 Dock Core is here.
It's available for $169.99.
You'll get HDMI, Ethernet, DisplayPort, and more.

A quick glance at the side of a modern Mac portable will make it immediately obvious that Apple's war on ports is well and truly over. Ethernet lost. HDMI lost. We all lost. But Belkin's new Thunderbolt 3 Dock Core might have the answer.

Available direct from Belkin for $169.99 (opens in new tab), this dock is nice and small and in a lot of ways looks like an Apple TV. Which is....fine?

More importantly, it takes a single Thunderbolt 3 port on your Mac and turns it into all kinds of ports that should probably already be there – Ethernet, HDMI, DisplayPort, a headphone jack, and two USB-A ports. It has a six-inch Thunderbolt 3 cable built in, too.

The Thunderbolt 3 Dock Core brings the speed, high-definition and performance of Thunderbolt technology to Mac and Windows laptops. With all the power and versatility of Thunderbolt 3, plus ports to connect multiple peripherals to a Thunderbolt laptop, this dock is a streamlined way to create an expanded, high-performing desktop through a single tethered cable.

Sounds pretty promising, right? That's because it is – and if you need a new dock for your Mac this is probably worth a look.

Oliver Haslam has written about Apple and the wider technology business for more than a decade with bylines on How-To Geek, PC Mag, iDownloadBlog, and many more. He has also been published in print for Macworld, including cover stories. At iMore, Oliver is involved in daily news coverage and, not being short of opinions, has been known to 'explain' those thoughts in more detail, too.

Having grown up using PCs and spending far too much money on graphics card and flashy RAM, Oliver switched to the Mac with a G5 iMac and hasn't looked back. Since then he's seen the growth of the smartphone world, backed by iPhone, and new product categories come and go. Current expertise includes iOS, macOS, streaming services, and pretty much anything that has a battery or plugs into a wall. Oliver also covers mobile gaming for iMore, with Apple Arcade a particular focus. He's been gaming since the Atari 2600 days and still struggles to comprehend the fact he can play console quality titles on his pocket computer.

1 Comment

"It has a six-inch Thunderbolt 3 cable built in, too." That would be a big turn off for me. It's too short and there isn't a thing you can do about it. Maybe there is a Thunderbolt cable extender. Haven't looked. I'd rather see a thunderbolt port on the thing and include a 6" cable. Then I can go buy a longer one. I'll grant that getting one that works may be a challenge, but that's my problem. I have been through that for a Uni dock. You can't go cheap. Whatever. I don't want my dock hanging in the air with all the other cables hanging off it, with my MacBook sitting in the riser it is in to get the screen at optimum height.