111–120 of 232 posts
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It's a fast and cheap way to avoid running afoul of trademark laws.
It isn't to avoid running afoul of trademark laws, it's just that it's easy to trademark pseudorandom brand names, and Amazon upranks trademarked brands.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why stop a labeling? You could design the connectors to only terminate at another connector that supports the same features, preventing anyone from confusing one cable for another. And the reason we don't do that is because it would expose the lie that there can be a universal data and power connector for all devices, and rather than live in a world where everything can connect perfectly fine with the right cables, w…
I think you’re letting perfect be the enemy of good here.
Insane difference between thunderbolt vs competitors. Clearly we are paying for quality here, the question is LTV how quickly does the thunderbolt break
> Insane difference between thunderbolt vs competitors. > Clearly we are paying for quality here It's not just quality. It's because Intel did the sensible thing and made a bunch of things that are optional in USB-C mandatory in Thunderbolt certification. So you always know what you're getting.
I'm a bit annoyed that the only comparisons in the article are Apple's gold plated cable and then three random Amazon fly by night cables. I wish they had tested a more reputable cable that was maybe only 1/4 of the price of the Apple cable.
There really aren't any, at least for genuine Thunderbolt 4 cables. Anker's 2.3-foot TB4 cable is $40, or about $17.40/foot, while Apple's 1-meter TB4 cable is $70, or $21.30/foot. Not a huge difference. Apple certainly gouges people a lot of the time, but I don't think their Thunderbolt cables are an example of this; they're genuinely complicated pieces of engineering.
I don't know a lot about intermediate quality cables, but I'd at least want to see a thunderbolt 4 fly by night cable, one of these $20-$30 ones.
The scans and analysis were cool, but comparing one quality cable from Apple to one budget offering from Amazon and two e-waste options from completely unknown brands isn't enough to answer the leading question "Does Apple’s Thunderbolt 4 cable really warrant its $129 price tag?" Especially considering none of those cables even advertised feature parity with Apple's cable.
I wish they imaged other premium third party cables like cablematters or anker.
It looks like they start at a 10 and then continue with 4, 3, 2.
I wonder who paid for this...how is this even getting so many upvotes? It's pretty much useless.
On the apple cable... That circuit looks like a lot more than an e-marker. Why do we have a massive 105 pin BGA chip in there? Does this cable run iOS or something?
Yes, this is the question I was going to ask. Is that an Apple ASIC? Or something off-the-shelf? Crazy if it was an FPGA inside a cable, but maybe not with the price tag. We need to have someone dissect one of these to see if there are any markings on that. I supposed something this tiny is a wafer level chip-scale package. I can't seem to find any 105 pin BGAs at Octopart or Digikey, but it isn't easy to shop by pin…
https://appleinsider.com/articles/22/04/23/teardown-of-apple...
“ Another curiosity hidden in the circuit board is this wiggle on one of the traces. It contains a tiny detour to make sure it’s the same length as its paired trace, which is especially important when dealing with extra-high-speed data transmission.” A wiggle that small is adding picosecond delays. I’m surprised that’s necessary. Cool!
This comes up all the time in the context of DRAM routing. See e.g. the first image at https://resources.altium.com/p/pcb-routing-guidelines-ddr4-m... .
Speaking of USB-C 10 Gbit/s cables, I've noticed something odd about the iPhone 15 Pro: I have a USB-C cable that has been yielding 10 Gbit/s speeds (i.e. USB 3 Gen 2x1 or possibly but very unlikely 1x2) when used at my Mac with various devices (mostly SSDs). However, that same cable only gets USB 2 speeds when connecting the iPhone to my Mac. The iPhone itself also seems to only get USB 2 speeds using the SSD and th…