Additional hardware is required, but for under $300 you can outfit your Mac to handle any generation Thunderbolt device, including bus-power-only peripherals.
When Thunderbolt 3 arrived, it was touted as not only twice as fast as previous generations, but completely backwards compatible with Thunderbolt 1 and 2. Signal-wise, that’s perfectly true. Physically, err… Thunderbolt 3 ditched the previous generation’s mini-DisplayPort connector for the slimmer, trimmer, orientation-agnostic USB Type-C port.
That was a nice move actually, but while adapters for the still plentiful Thunderbolt 2 Macs and perhipherals arrived in short order, they didn’t support bus-power-only devices like all those sexy Thunderbolt portable SSDs I review for Macworld. Bummer.
However, there’s always been an easy, albeit somewhat pricey and not particularly portable solution: a powered dock.
Read more at MacWorld.com