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My wife has both a work and a home MacBook Air. She would like to be able to connect her home monitor and peripherals to something that would allow her to switch between the two laptops without unplugging and re-plugging things. Of old this would mean looking for a KVM switch.

However, the MB Airs use USB C and the monitor connects via USB C. The monitor also has several USB A ports and acts as a USB hub, so in theory I would only need something like what I've shown in the diagram.

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The problem being that the simple switch I've imagined here does not seem to exist. Or maybe my Google-fu is just not sharp enough to find it?

I don't want to spend $600 on an all-singing, all-dancing USB-C dock with a switch attachment, but that's all my searching seems to turn up. Any suggestions?

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  1. Turn a $30 USB switch into a full-featured KVM doesn't work with Apple Silicon Macs at the moment but there's a workaround in linked issues if you are not afraid of compiling Rust.
  2. Sabrent has a USB C KVM
  3. This really is a plus one because of the price. Sabrent also has a Thunderbolt 4 KVM.

There is a #0 solution which was the Cabledeconn Bidirectional USB C switch which is no longer available but it's available under other labels. However, CableDeconn at least had the decency to warn not to connect this switch to docking stations which severely limits the utility of it. If you want to experiment: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B092VHC166 currently at https://www.amazon.com/dp/B096KHP7LK and other labels, every time you see a 10gbps bidirectional switch, it's this one.

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