jdiamond

A good reminder that we should hold off buying new Mac Hardware when Catalina is first released until we have a proven set up working with Catalina - 'cause new Macs won't support Mojave. 

And I can't spread this news enough - running your old 32-bit MacOS apps in an emulator DOES NOT WORK, so if this is your backup plan, abandon it now.  The reason is that Apple doesn't provide an accelerated 3D API to emulators like VMWare Fusion and Parallels, and there is no software fallback API.  I've found than even some of the simplest 2D apps I've tried simply crash and exit, 'cause they all still try to do something graphical.  This is an unfortunate move by Apple, who could easily provide an emulator, but I assume it's to give developers an impetus for people to move iOS apps to Mac, just as having only USB-C plugs gives manufacturers a reason to make USB-C devices.

For current software under active development, this is not an issue.  But I've found most developers, even if still active, can't even recompile their older software let alone fix it.  Sad sounding, but just the way it is.  

So glad you wrote this article - glad to find out about this hub.  Certainly looks less "Hideous" to me than the other hubs out there.  You missed two important features of the hub, though:

1) You can hook a hard drive up to the USB-A port and charge at the same time.  There is no penalty - it reads and writes files at the same speed, whether on the USB-C port or the USB-A port, both at 5 gigabits (USB 3.0 speeds).  And USB-C to USB-A cables are ubiquitous.

2) It not only supports HDMI, but the USB-C port also supports Displayport 1.2 with HDCP!  (But only up to Full-HD resolution.) . But now you really can't charge at the same time.

Yeah - I lived through all this as well.  . I get what you're saying about the Microsoft part, but I'm not quite getting your point regarding why Android actually did well in PostPC when Microsoft couldn't.  Are you saying it's because Android was willing to just copy iOS, but Microsoft wasn't?  Just trying to clarify the punchline.

My quick, but admittedly shallow, gut reaction on such a topic would be that Microsoft relied on exclusive software to lock people into Windows regardless of the experience, but for PostPC, people didn't care, because they were already using new PostPC software.  As a result, people were free to choose whatever platform worked best for them.  But similar to Windows, once they got used to a platform (iOS or Android) it was almost impossible for them to change.  So in this view, Android won because they existed at the same time and were better than Microsoft Windows and people had no real reason to be forced to stay with Windows.  I can't help but think that if there was NEVER an Android, Microsoft WOULD become an alternative PostPC platform for people totally used to Windows...  Although it'd still be hard for them to have the same Monopoly on software they once did.

blastdoor said:

Ack. 

For the most part, I think Apple is right to purge old software in order to advance the platform. But there are some old games that are painful to lose. Is it possible to run older versions of OSX in a virtual machine in order to play these classics? Or would one be forced to run an older version of Windows in a VM to play the classics? 

I tried to play old games in a Virtual Machine running High Sierra and it was a complete no go.  Either for technical or political reasons, emulators like VMWare Fusion and Parallels cannot provide 3D acceleration for MacOS, but the issue is there's no software 3D emulation layer, so any app that makes any kind of 3D call (all of mine) simply exits with an error in the emulator.  Seems like the best you can do is have a dual boot into an old MacOS version, and that's only if you have Mac hardware old enough to support it.

Mike Wuerthele said:

lkrupp said:

USB 4 will almost certainly be an optical standard . Otherwise the cable lengths will be limited to about 6”. Copper just can’t go that fast no matter what the encoding scheme is. Copper has resistance, light doesn’t. And someone tell me why an iPhone would need a 40 gigabit connections, hmmmm.

Copper goes that fast in six-foot Thunderbolt 3 now. Did you mean six feet, and not six inches?

My guess is Ikrupp probably didn't realize this was actually 10 gigabits x 4 and thought it was a single 40 GHz serial line.  But yeah - this offers nothing to the Mac camp - we've had TB3 since 2016.  On copper.    I'm waiting and hoping for TB4, so we can have ever better eGPUs.