ascii

About

Username
ascii
Joined
Visits
195
Last Active
Roles
member
Points
772
Badges
1
Posts
5,936

Reactions

461Like0Dislike44Informative

  • One cable to rule them all: a look at Apple's retired connectors through the years

    asciiascii

    ascii said:
    Nice survey. That last sentence is a key point though. The Thunderbolt 3 bus over USB type C port will not be the one port to rule them all, it will just be one more port.
    Try explaining that?

    One connector with both a professional (40 Gbit/s bi-directional 80 Gbit/s)  and consumer (10 Gbit/s) level data transfer standards on it. Plus, it's backward compatible with all versions of USB without a dongle (converter), just change the cable, $5 each and at most you'll need 3 cables. I had been waiting a long time to replace a lot of my external devices, now I only buy USB-C/TB-3 and most come with USB-C to USB-A cables.

    It can pretty much can replace everything out there (USB, Firewire, Serial, parallel, mini-SATA, HDMI, Display Port, ethernet, audio, etc).

    Plus with a dock, you can channel everything to include audio, video, ethernet, a discrete GPU and 100w of laptop power through a single cable. If anything the laptop power will make it the go to standard, since no other cable does it and that power can be drawn from a power supply or another device, like a monitor.

    I only use a dock at home so I can use one cable to connect everything. I'm only on Thunderbolt 1 and it works like a charm.

    I can't think of a single consumer device (TVs, computers, smartphones, etc,) that couldn't replace all of it's ports with this one connector, maybe with the exception of ethernet, since that plug is unlikely to be replaced due to the nature of the cabling.

    One current consumer device that does not perform optimally optimally over TB3 is eGPUs. If you look at most reviews they say that it runs ~ 15% slower than the same GPU connected via a PCI-E slot. We should expect a future TB4 to have higher data rates and lower latency/protocol overhead. You can imagine 8K monitors aren't that far away either (Dell already has the UP3218K - 7680 x 4320 resolution).

    But that's just a protocol/controller upgrade. Whether it will require a new port too I don't know, they might just run the current one as higher frequency. But as I said to Soli I think they will eventually want to go to something smaller. Can't you imagine a more futuristic port than USB-C? Maybe a pure fibre optic connector called USB-X. Technology doesn't stand still.
    watto_cobra

  • One cable to rule them all: a look at Apple's retired connectors through the years

    asciiascii
    Soli said:
    We're living in the golden age of port interfaces. This doesn't go into all the connectors used by WinPCs, but thanks to Apple moving to USB we saw a lot of those fall away much faster than they would have had Apple not made the first move. I do not miss all the variants of DVI that appeared on Macs over the years. Long live the USB-C port interface.


    ascii said:
    Nice survey. That last sentence is a key point though. The Thunderbolt 3 bus over USB type C port will not be the one port to rule them all, it will just be one more port.
    The USB-C port interface is the closest we've ever come to that and it's one of two port interfaces on the current MBP. I see no reason why protocols graters than USB 3.1 and TB3 won't be able to utilize USB-C in the future so why don't you think it fits the "to "one port to rule them all" mantra?
    I think they will eventually replace USB-C with something else for the same reason they replaced USB-A with USB-C, namely they will want to have a smaller connector still.
    watto_cobra

  • One cable to rule them all: a look at Apple's retired connectors through the years

    asciiascii
    Nice survey. That last sentence is a key point though. The Thunderbolt 3 bus over USB type C port will not be the one port to rule them all, it will just be one more port.
    watto_cobra

  • Default Samsung messaging app randomly spamming contacts with pictures

    asciiascii
    When they eventually track this down it will be interesting to see what the bug was! As a developer its hard to imagine what's going on.
    dysamoriacornchipwatto_cobra

  • Apple's new macOS Mojave optimizes the Mac for iOS users, not PC switchers

    asciiascii
    I really like that switch of perspective and think its undoubtedly correct, and also bonus points for the Ellen Feiss memory.

    Was this always the plan though? It did seem for a while that they were positioning the iPad to take over from the Mac, and then some internal decision happened, perhaps what happened is they came up with exactly the sales model you're talking about.

    I remember the thing that really made the PC take off (and it started with Win 3.1 even before Win 95) was that people could basically get free software from their workplace by pirating it, something you couldn't do with the Mac. So every PC unofficially came with a huge library of software. But with this new app porting framework, and the idea that the Mac is primarily being marketed to iOS users, its kind of the same thing (but without the piracy). Even new Mac will come with a big library of software corresponding to those iPhone apps you already have (that the devs have done the porting for).

    How on Earth could Microsoft fight back against that? I think they've been strategically out-thought.
    radarthekatSgt Storms(trooper)watto_cobra