[JosephRedfern]

It's a little janky (you have to boot to recovery mode), but you _kinda_ can with modern macs by using Target Disk Mode.

The drive appears as a network share, but it's not bidirectional, in that you can read/write from/to the target device, but the target device do the same to you.

[zbrozek]

That's undershooting the possibility by a lot. If I plug two computers into each other via USB I would expect the OS on each to establish a network link at the best-available bandwidth.

[acchow]

On Mac, You can establish a thunderbolt-bridge network connection and then share files.

But it's not automatic. You gotta do it manually https://support.apple.com/guide/mac-help/ip-thunderbolt-conn....

I would have expected airdrop to automatically switch to thunderbolt if such a connection exists, but it doesn't.

[jasomill]

Unless something has changed in recent macOS versions, by default:

1. Thunderbolt Bridge exists and is enabled.

2. All active (enabled, connected) interfaces get link-local IPv6 addresses.

3. All active interfaces without static or DHCP-assigned IPv4 addresses get link-local IPv4 addresses.

3. Multicast DNS (Bonjour) is enabled.

So basic networking should be automatic, though no file sharing services are enabled by default.

[acchow]

That's great! I wonder when they will automatically switch Airdrop over to thunderbolt when one is available.

[zbrozek]

I'd like to do this with actual universal serial bus (USB), not peripheral component interconnect express (PCIe) on a universal serial bus connector.

[vardump]

That’s what already happens (at least with TB, USB 4?).

10 Gbps networking. Although it seems to have really high latency for whatever reason.

[zbrozek]

I'd like it to work USB 1.1 through 3.2, not just Thunderbolt. We have dual role, why aren't we using it? Host side thinks it's talking to a NIC, device side acts like a NIC.