anome

I take it this is different from an actual Light Peak connection, in that it's not using a native optical signal, just transmitting the Thunderbolt signal over an optic connection.

Shame Light Peak didn't really get any traction on its own - Thunderbolt was supposed to just be a placeholder while they got the cost of the hardware down. Then again, I was always a bit hazy about how power transmission was supposed to work without the copper. (I mean, it's possible, but it would make the hardware even more expensive and complicated.)

Come to think of it, do the Corning cables support Power Delivery? Or is that specifically a part of the USB spec they don't support?

I didn't realise this was meant to be a "Global Flagship" store. I'm not surprised they've given up on Federation Square, though. Melbournians are very conservative and parochial. Comes from their inferiority complex over Sydney. Kind of like Chicago and New York.

Apple, if you're reading this, if you want to open a bigger store in Canberra, I'd be willing to go there. And at least a few hundred other people would, too...

Just don't put it in Perth. No-one wants to go to Perth.

One thing I haven't been able to determine, and this probably reflects my poor understanding of how credit cards work in the US, but when does interest kick in on the card?

Most cards here have an interest free period, which is just the time between the start of the billing month and the due date for the payment, so that if you pay your balance before the due date, you never pay interest. This is usually advertised as "55 days interest free", for example where the due date is 25 days after the statement date.

So with the Apple Card, where the due date is the last day of the month, is that also the statement date? Do charges only accrue interest if you carry a balance forward past the end of the month? Do they accrue interest from the date of the charge? These are things that would normally be spelled out in the Terms and Conditions for a credit card, but I haven't seen for Apple Card yet.

sflocal said:

I paid $2,400 for my 12TB Promise Thunderbolt 2 RAID array back in 2015 for my iMac.  The six drives I have in it still cannot saturate the TB2. I'm really impressed with the performance of this new TB3 SSD unit.  It's pretty amazing how fast technology has evolved since then.  I would seriously consider the 8TB version.. the only caveat is that the single SSD unit is technically less reliable than my 6-drive enclosure.  I wouldn't sweat too much if I had a drive fail in my RAID array, but I'd be sh----g bricks if my 8TB SSD drive failed.  I'd love to see a full TB3 SSD-only RAID enclosure. Having that much bandwidth available with drives that can push that kind of data is just amazing.

Look at the OWC Express 4M2 NVMe enclosure. It came up in a discussion on one of the earlier threads about external SSDs. It takes 4 NVMe SSDs and uses Thunderbolt 3 connectivity.

randominternetperson said:

MplsP said:

I don’t quite get why releasing 3rd party lightning - usb c cables was an issue. 3rd party lightning-USB A cables have obviously been around forever, and USB C is just a different form factor for usb 3. 

That said, they’re really of limited use. Peter Schiller’s hallucinations aside, the world runs on USB A. The only benefit is to be able to directly plug into a MacBook Pro, but since the first accessory most people buy is a usb C-A dongle, even that isn’t much of a benefit

Huh.  I'm looking at the Dell notebook that I was assigned at work as a replacement for my desktop PC (as were the hundreds of other employees at my company).  There is no USB-A port, just 3 USB-C ports.  The tipping point has been reached.  USB-A will be around for a long time, but it's losing its dominance.

(Having said that, I agree with the first point.  What took so long to have an "official" third-party option?)

I believe a large part of the delay was getting the new MFi spec for USB-C out of Apple. Then they have to assure compliance with the spec and get Apple to certify it. I seem to recall there was a delay in Apple releasing the updated MFi spec, much longer than it should have been when they were shipping products with USB-C 2 years ago.