A dongle is a hardware peripheral with the only intent being to allow operation of software on said machine. Its goal is to prevent software piracy. i.e. the software won’t run if it can’t find the hardware dongle on the port somewhere.
A dongle is a hardware peripheral with the only intent being to allow operation of software on said machine. Its goal is to prevent software piracy. i.e. the software won’t run if it can’t find the hardware dongle on the port somewhere.
In this case i belive they are talking.is for physical layer 1 interface....
You want to plug in an rj45 cable for ethernet.
But there is no port
So you need an rj45 ethernet dongle to usb or some other proprietary physical interface the pc has
That was the original definition. The early ones connected to serial ports, not USB.
But, today, 99.9+% of the dongles in the wild exist to provide some sort of connectivity. E.g., to communicate with a wireless mouse or keyboard. Or to provide WiFi or Bluetooth to a computer not otherwise equipped. Or, in the case of the Mac USB-C ports, to adapt to other high-speed connectors, until peripherals come out that plug into USB-C directly.
That is ONE type of "dongle" - but in this case, we are talking about something completely different - In the case of MacBook and MacBook Pro - a dongle is a means of adding ports for extra external peripherals. You can get a dongle to add multiple USB ports, card readers, external drives, etc.