Alvin Poh

I've over 17 years of entrepreneurship experience, having built a tech company to be the top in the country, which was subsequently acquired for an 8-figure sum. As CEO, I led the company through robust growth to 150 employees across 4 countries. After the acquisition, I embraced minimalism, sold off my personal possessions, and started living around the world. Read more about my story here.

How To Run Third-Party USB Ethernet Adaptors with Your Apple Macbook Notebook

Ever since Apple started trimming down the ports on their Macbook notebooks, there’s been an increasing demand for adaptors to make up for the lack of connectivity. Today, I found out that I needed to access my Asus wireless router to set it up for a new ISP that I subscribed to. Unfortunately, I only had a third-party, non-Apple ethernet adaptor. In this case, it was a USB ethernet dongle from Lenovo.

When I plugged it into my Macbook, nothing happened. Clearly, Apple only provided drivers and support for their own Apple adaptors. Thankfully, there were third-party drivers for common USB ethernet adaptors. Plugable had the Mac drivers for the USB2-E100 and USB2-OTGE100 chipsets, which were pretty common in third-party USB ethernet dongles. When I installed it on my Macbook Air, the Lenovo USB ethernet dongle came alive and started working.