Mac mini (M2) and Dell D6000 Docking station

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Mac mini (M2) and Dell D6000 Docking station

Hey, I have a work setup provided by my company - HP laptop, two 24" HP screens (HDMI and Display port) and key board and mouse (USB A) with a Dell D6000 docking station - mains powered. All the components plug into the docking station with a single USB C cable running to the laptop - this also provides power. This works great (kind of a relief as I am unable to change pretty much any settings on the laptop). We recently bought a Mac mini (M2) and I had naively thought that I could just unplug the USB C cable from the HP laptop into the Mac mini, and use all the peripherals. I was keen to avoid having to unplug all the cables from the docking station into the back of the mini but this seems to the be the only way. Am I missing a straight forward solution?

Mac mini, macOS 14.0

Posted on Oct 12, 2023 11:50 AM

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Answer 1

Dec 6, 2023 4:54 PM in response to Brixton_Devon19

Hopefully I'm not too late but I can confirm it it possible.

I've got an M2 Mac Mini and I'm currently driving 3 displays (2 via a Dell D6000 dock) and one via the onboard HDMI. I have the Dell dock plugged into one of the USB-C ports on the mini.

Firstly, you'll need to download the DisplayLink software (DisplayLink macOS Software for Downloads Section | Synaptics)

Once downloaded, installed, make sure you click allow when it asks for sharing permissions.

I'm currently driving a 43" Dell (P4317Q) via one of the DisplayPorts on the dock, a 28" (the vertical one, L28TN4K) via the other DisplayPort on the dock to an HDMI input by way of a cable with DP one end and HDMI the other, and a 29" LG (29EB93) via the HDMI port on the Mac Mini (I did try from the dock as well but that didn't work)!

One thing to note is that I didn't have an option for screen rotation on the native Mac OS settings, however this can be done in the DisplayLink Manager

It has played nice as well not fighting for network (both the Mac Mini and Dell Dock have ethernet wired to them), both network interfaces have their own IP!

Hopefully this will help some folks out

Regards

Chris

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Answer 2

Oct 16, 2023 12:36 PM in response to Tesserax

Thank you. The dock was shipped in a simple brown box with no paperwork and had just assumed that it would work - teach me :-). Best start looking to see if there are other dual screen docking screens that will serve both purposes. All the same, thank you Tesserax

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Answer 3

Dec 7, 2023 1:54 PM in response to chrisfromnorwich

If like me you use the other inputs on the monitor (I use the middle and left connected to another Dell D6000 Dock for my work laptop which are connected via DisplayPort), you might find that the last remaining screen remains the default, even after swapping the other 2 back to the correct inputs - I just needed to toggle one of the displays in the DisplayLink Manager app and they both came back to life :)

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Answer 4

Tesserax

Level 10

148,949 points

Oct 12, 2023 3:33 PM in response to Brixton_Devon19

Being curious, I located the user guide for this Dell dock, and my guess is that since it does not include macOS as a supported operating system, is why it's not working for you.

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Mac mini (M2) and Dell D6000 Docking station

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