Newbie question: What do I need to do, if anything, to ‘grab and go’ with my MacBook Air (M3) other than pulling out the USB-C Thunderbolt cable going to my monitor?
I.E.:
Do I need to worry if the laptop is active with apps open on the display?
Should I completely shutdown the Macbook or put it into sleep mode?
What about USB-C peripherals attached to the ports on the back of the Studio Display? (I’m primarily worried about a small external SSD drive I have connected and not wanting any data corruption).
Just trying to be super-careful and learn the best practices so I don’t simply yank the cable (easy but potentially risky) or go through a complete power down sequence (safest, but most time-consuming),
Indeed. And @SpivR if you want to be unplugging your laptop without waking it first to eject, you could use something like Jettison which should auto-unmount/remount the drive when your computer sleeps/wakes.
I cannot count the times I have force disconnected external thumb drives and even spinning hard disks without data loss. I believe that, unless you have heavy disk activity when disconnecting, the filesystem usually commits changes very fast to the disk so one is usually protected from the occasional mishap. This cannot be recommended on a day to day basis, of course, you should unmount your disks before unplugging the computer from them.
But let me remind another, more insidious situation: if you store your Photo Library in an external hard drive, you will find that you cannot eject the drive at all while background services like photoanalysisd are doing their thing even if Photos.app is not running. And I can guarantee that disconnecting the drive while this happen will corrupt your Photo Library. That’s inconvenient when you are in a hurry because you need to either log out or shutdown the computer to be toally safe. But if you do not use the extenral disk for your Photo Library, you can ignore this.
A lot of folks have given you tremendous advice here. I have a little bit of advice myself: plug your hard drive directly into your laptop. The monitor charges your laptop while it’s in clamshell mode, so you can use the remaining port for your backups. That way, you never forget to unplug the hard drive.
It’s great that the Studio Display has USB-C ports, and you should use them. They’re perfect for charging your keyboard or your mouse (or your phone, etc), the Logitech USB receiver, or that audio rig you always have plugged in at your desk. You might also consider an ethernet dongle for it.
The great thing about going this route is that the Studio Display then basically becomes a desktop rig you plug into. If you have a partner (or a roommate, or kid, or whoever) with their own Mac, they could also plug directly into the monitor and get all the benefits of the desktop with a setup like this, and you’d never have to worry about them interfering with your backups this way either.
Obviously this is a little annoying because you’re plugging in and unplugging more than one thing if you’re plugging in both a monitor and a hard drive. There are ways around this, but they’re expensive and fiddily (buy a NAS or a Mac Mini with a DAS, or both of those things, depending on your needs, and configure wireless backups).
But this is the life of a clamshell laptop user. This (and fewer ports) are basically the only downsides.
I was really hoping for a seamless, fool-proof solution with only a single connection to unplug from the laptop to the monitor (the Thunderbolt connection).
Thanks to everyone, I have several options to consider, but none are my ideal.
Actually, my ideal is what I had many years ago when I was fortunate to have a well-equipped Mac setup by my employer - The Apple motorized Duo Dock.
Yes, the raw power then was nothing compared to what we have now, but having an Apple laptop that I just shoved into a dock/stand sitting underneath a huge (for it’s day) 19" Sony color monitor and just pressing a button and watch as the laptop is physically ejected forward by a motor just enough to grab and go is something I still miss and wish they’d bring back.
Yeah, the Nintendo Switch always gave me Duo Dock vibes. Super cool thing. I get what you’re saying. Jettison might be your best bet for your particular dream
And