Having one or more USB ports not working on your Mac can be hugely frustrating, especially if you rely on those ports for data backup and external peripherals. That said, USB problems are quite rare and are usually easy to fix. Work your way through these troubleshooting tips until you find the one that works and restore your Mac to its full glory.
What it does: Thunderbolt cables have a few different uses like connecting to external monitors and USB devices, as well as providing enough bandwidth to connect with high-speed devices and extend your laptop's capabilities. While the Pro 2021 had three ports, the new MacBook Air has two Thunderbolt ports that support charging, an external display, Thunderbolt 3, USB 4 and USB 3.1 Gen 2.
External Usb Ports For Mac
What it does: Headphone ports let you connect external headphones using a cable, rather than wirelessly with Bluetooth. You can also plug in legacy or specialty gear, like a microphone. Like the Pro, the new MacBook Air supports high-impedance headphones.
I have connected an external monitor to my macbook pro through a thunderbolt vga adapter. The monitor has several USB ports on it and if I plug a mouse or keyboard into them, they will not work. Is there a fix for this?
Now, once you identify the issue, you want to resolve it as soon as possible. If you have checked all the USB ports and are unresponsive, you need to check if your USB card got malfunctioned or any software issue. A specialist can help you out to resolve it through a system check.
First, make sure the device you are attaching is properly inserted with cable, and then check the wire connected to the Mac. It is the most common reason that one of the ports is not connected to the wire, and you are looking at bigger things overlooking this minor detail.
It is very frustrating when USB ports don't work with Mac. External data backup and peripherals that need the USB port will be useless if one of the USB ports is not working. Needless to mention that with the help of the remedies mentioned above, you can easily fix and recover data from USB, which is not working on Mac.
These tips will make your life easier while you reset the USB ports on your Mac. To recover the data from Mac USB not working, this guide wholly recommends the Tenorshare 4DDIG Mac. It is swift yet straightforward when it comes to rescuing hopelessly lost data on the Mac system. Restoring data from USB on Mac was never that easy before 4DDiG.
It may happen that earlier, the USB ports were working fine. But you downloaded one or more apps, due to which the USB port is not functioning correctly. In such a case, delete one (or more) of the recently downloaded apps and see if the problem is solved or not.
Checking for updates may be one of the easiest ways to open USB ports on your Mac. Firmware updates address a variety of hardware issues and the functionality of the USB ports could well be one of them.
The USB-C port on MacBook and MacBook Pro laptops is fast, versatile, and apparently unreliable. After six months of use, many users are experiencing poor connections to external devices. Are your MacBook USB-C ports loose? Read below to find out what you can do about it.
As a result, slight movements of the cable or MacBook can cause the USB-C connection to drop out. This could cause external monitors to flicker, or in worse cases, it could cause external hard drives to corrupt.
That being said, you should do everything possible to maintain your USB-C ports, minimizing the risk of encountering such an issue. To do so you could follow some of the maintenance tips detailed below.
Protect your laptop from damage and your ports from dust build-up by using a laptop sleeve. Purchasing a padded laptop sleeve is one of the most cost-effective ways to provide long-lasting protection for your expensive device.
If you do find that dust or dirt is clogging up your USB-C port you should use cans of compressed air to clear it out. These can be bought online and are by far the safest way to clean your laptop ports.
If you do find your ports clogged up with particularly stubborn dirt you could use a toothpick to carefully scrape it out. Although, when doing so you must be very careful to keep the toothpick against the outside edge of the port and away from the sensitive connections in the middle.
This is terrible. I have two macs pro with 4 ports each not too old at all.I plug unplug to monitors quite often due to work reasons.Now I have any port flickering which is very annoying. I had no idea these ports are so unreliable.
Since 2016 I got a new Macbook Pro at work year after year. (My boss loves new stuff and every January we can get a new device if we want).And since my first Touchbar Macbook Pro in 2016 almost all my USB-C ports got loose or malfunctioned in some way after 3 to 6 months. Same story with the Macs of my coworkers.On all my private devices with USB-C (Android Phones, PC Laptops of my family etc.) I never saw a problem with the ports.Every year I go to the Apple Store, show them the bad ports and they always tell me, that they have never seen that before.
My experience is that this problem has little to do with dust, lint or anything else in the actual port, and more to do with a loosening of the port connection. USB-C, engineering-wise, is an inferior construction for durable lifespan. All of my USB-C connections are spotty at best, when compared to, say, Lightning ports, which seem to stand up very well to abuse, variation, and ultimately, the test of time.
After the first round of checking, you can try to repair the corrupted USB drive. There are four common ways: reset USB ports, repair USB in Disk Utility, repair USB with Terminal, and reformat the USB drive.
Commonly, when you insert a USB drive in the USB port on a Mac computer, the drive will soon appear on the desktop or hide in the Finder, letting you access, view, and manage data on it. Did you come across the situation that no matter how many times you try to connect the USB drive with a Mac computer, the USB drive is not showing up anywhere? Why this time Mac won't recognize a connected USB you may wonder. Though not a usual thing, the issue of an external hard drive or flash drive not showing up on Mac happens sometimes. What should you do in this circumstance? What are the effective solutions to make your USB drive show up again?
This page basically covers all the possible fixes for USB not showing up on Mac, which also applies to the similar issues of other storage devices like an external hard drive not showing up on Mac, flash drive not showing up on Mac, SD card not showing up on Mac, etc. Take a quick glance at the main content and directly jump to the part you're most interested in.
Step 4. For SD card owners, the common way to connect an SD card to a Mac needs a card reader. If changing the USB ports did not work, try to change a card reader for a new round of tests.
Finder is the other access for us to check a connected external drive on Mac. If your flash drive or external hard drive is not showing up there, go to Finder > Preferences > Sidebar, and under Locations, you need to tick the option "External disks". By selecting this option, we can make sure that the connected external USB hard drive or flash drive will normally show up in the Finder.
Did your Mac's OS keep updating all the time? Chances are that your Mac won't recognize a USB drive, especially after a macOS update. This time, take a close look at the settings whether your Mac is up-to-date. Equally, firmware updates address a variety of hardware issues and the functionality of the USB ports could well be one of them. So, keep your software and firmware up to date will likely make the USB drive show up as normal again.
Mac won't recognize a badly damaged flash drive or external hard drive since there is no way to show it up, even temporarily, which makes the data recovery difficult. The last chance for you to rescue data is to send the broken USB drive to a specialized data recovery service center nearby and let the professionals try their best. You must prepare for the manual data recovery cost, which is noticeably higher than the software data recovery. Hence, always try the cost-effective plan of using EaseUS Data Recovery Wizard to scan the USB drive for the first attempt.
The Dell DA300 is one of the smallest and most portable USB-C hubs around, thanks to its circular shape and retractable cable. It features an HDMI port, a DisplayPort, a VGA port, an RJ45 Ethernet port, one USB Type-C port, and one USB 3.1 port. While it may not have enough ports, especially when it comes to USB-A, the variety it boasts more than makes up for it. Overall, it's a great USB-C hub to take on the go, as long as you're okay with the relatively steep price.
FireWire ruled until USB 3 was added to Macs in 2011. This protocol provided data transfer rates of up to 5 Gbps (gigabits per second), and the ability to send data to displays. (Note that 1 Gbps is equivalent to 1,000 Mbps.) At the same time, Macs started including Thunderbolt ports, with 10 Gbps throughput. Thunderbolt 2 came along in 2014, with up to 20 Gbps, and Thunderbolt 3, in 2017, offered up to 40 Gbps.
The first two iterations of Thunderbolt used ports with a non-reversible connector, in the shape of the old Mini DisplayPort. Thunderbolt 3 and 4 eschewed their former shape in favor of modern USB-C shaped ports with reversible connectors.
At this point, you might be asking yourself, why not buy Thunderbolt 4 cables exclusively? If a Thunderbolt 4 cable is compatible with Thunderbolt 3, USB 4, and other USB-C shaped ports and devices, why buy anything else?
While all MacBook Pro models released in the last five years featured only two to four Thunderbolt ports and a 3.5mm headphone jack, that changed this week with the introduction of the redesigned 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pro models. 2ff7e9595c
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