Either you're mobile and need the USB ports, or stationary and there's a hub there. What use case am I missing?
I don't know of a monitor that doesn't require a USB A-B cable to provide USB, so you're looking at three $70 adapters, plus three USB A-B cables. Sure maybe all that lives at the office. It's still less convenient.
I still can't get over the fact that you can't plug your new iPhone 7 into your new Macbook Pro without a dongle.
It seems like in the new USB-C world, I'd only have to connect one cable. Bonus points if it's sturdier than mini-DP and less flaky than MagSafe. Sure beats those weird-ass proprietary docks that used to be common ~10 years ago.
That's something I've never seen properly explained. Can you charge at 100W at the same time as using Thunderbolt 3 connectivity? It strikes me as unlikely since the power delivery and the signaling would have to share the same pins/wires.
Edit: I stand corrected after seeing that new LG monitor. Now I'm just curious how it works. Even PoE can't deliver 100w and Thunderbolt 3 uses much higher speeds while having to inject power.
1) PoE only uses two pairs of wires for transmitting current, USB-C PD uses four pairs.
2) Ethernet cables are rated for much longer lengths, show me a 100m USB cable.
3) Ethernet is typically run in walls and more often than not is grouped into bundles, so heat dissipation is an issue.
4) PoE delivers power at ~50v, USB-C PD does 20v.
Also, piggybacking on the other commenter's reply, PoE voltage is carried on the same wires that are transmitting data (for 1000Base-T anyway)
It also has two pairs of unshielded twisted pair for non-superspeed (USB 2.0) though only one pair is used in the cable apparently; which USB 2 channel you get depends on which way the cable is plugged in I guess.
It has a pair for sideband use. A pair for configuration and control.
The data primarily travels over the four high-speed differential signal pairs; two TX pairs and two RX pairs.
All USB 3 cables must have a chip in them. It communicates over the C&C channel to select how the high-speed pairs are used. When a display is connected, one TX/RX set are used for USB 3 and the other for DisplayPort.
USB 3 also supports "alternate" modes, so the C&C can negotiate that all high-speed pairs are used for Thunderbolt which is just the PCI-Express bus. Intel added the ability to interleave DisplayPort packets with the PCI-Express data. I assume that displays with USB 3 built-in are simply connecting a PCI-E USB hub to the Thunderbolt interface since in that mode there is no actual USB signal in the cable. USB 2 can use the dedicated signal pair for that and not interfere with DisplayPort or Thunderbolt traffic.
Thunderbolt is a nicer standard in some ways - interleaving means if you aren't using a 16bpp 5K display at max refresh rate you have more bandwidth available for other devices. With USB 3 you get half the available bandwidth if you connect a display. Thunderbolt is also old-school in the sense that it projects the CPU's bus to external peripherals... something all early computers used to do. Everything old is new again!
It is obvious USB-3 was very forward-looking. The C&C channel means some future version of the standard can drop USB-2 support and start connecting the unconnected pair if both ends negotiate for it. Now you have an extra TX/RX channel to give you +50% bandwidth. You can also imagine taking over the side channel pins. If you assume the next-gen standard can double USB-3's 10Gbps and add in double the data pairs that would be 40Gbps which matches Thunderbolt 3. Apply the same math to Thunderbolt and that's 160Gbps.
> I still can't get over the fact that you can't plug your new iPhone 7 into your new Macbook Pro without a dongle.
You've never been able to though? There is a USB-C to Lightning cable.
I think it was more a complaint about the fact that you'd have to buy an additional adapter to be able to connect the two.
I'll be picking up one of the $60-100 hubs/docks that have a single USB-C connector and HDMI/Ethernet/USB-A to connect all of my devices. When the monitors are cheaper in 4 years I'll buy one of those.
My point was that we're actually moving to a really good solution where you can plug in a single, non-proprietary cable and get all the throughput and peripheral connectors you could ever need. It's not even particularly expensive compared to a dock 5-10 years ago.
That describes my workplace. (But with two rather than three monitors.) Standard monitors that operate over HDMI/DVI/etc don't have USB hubs without a separate USB connection, most keyboards are the same way.
> Either you're mobile and need the USB ports, or stationary and there's a hub there. What use case am I missing?
Sure, you can work around the lack of IO by buying a hub, but the point was that previously you would not have needed yet another dongle.
There aren't that many good one's. What I would need would be one which handle's at least, 4-6 USB, two HDMI, Ethernet and charging would be a bonus.
The display was the soul of the desktop Mac. It's easier to perceive your Macbook as another PC when your window into it is another mostly generic-looking LG display, even if the panel in the Apple branded display was manufactured by LG.
Perhaps they want to focus on the iMac again and don't want the MBP + display combo to cannibalize it. But again, with extreme focus soon they'll be abandoning the iMac for good.
(I still love macOS and I enjoy how the new MBP looks)
This has all happened before with the original iMac. And it was universally seen in the long run as one of the best decisions they made.
Monitor-as-dock makes a great deal of sense for the roving user with a fixed base.
I would be happy if an adapter exists for this job. The monitor needn't natively support DisplayPort.
came up in a quick search. Looks good to me!
But your run of the mill Dell office monitors do have a USB hub, most often 2 ports on the back panel for keyboard/mouse and 2 ports on the side for flash drives and other transient accessories.
colanderman's point is that you should get a USB cable and use that hub instead of individually plugging everything into the laptop. Three video connections and one hub connection gets you all the connectivity you need at a desk. If you're mobile, you'll certainly need less.
At work I have an Apple monitor that has multiple USB ports and an Ethernet port on the back of it. I think it has speakers too. All that and the display run across the mini-DP connection. Again, not exactly run-of-the-mill, but well within the price range of Apple's target market, and given Apple's push in that direction, it's liable to be commonplace in a couple years anyway.
And they can all be 4k.
Second of all, it's yet another dongle I have to carry around and potentially lose. There's often not a whole lot of room on stage, so space is precious.
Thirdly, those dongles that convert video are usually slow garbage. If I am performing as a VJ, I need the video to be frame-synced and perfectly synced to the music without lag. I can do that just fine on my current MBP (run 3 monitors at once from the ports built-in to the computer. That's specifically why I bought it.) And now I can do that just fine from some Asus laptop since Apple doesn't seem to want my business anymore.
Plus, it has an additional 3 USB-C ports, meaning you plug one cable in to your Macbook Pro, and you are left with a total of 6 USB-C slots free, which you don't need because power is provided over the same cable anyway...
[1] http://www.apple.com/shop/product/HKN62LL/A/lg-ultrafine-5k-...
The old Apple Lightning Display was a nice everything-dock.
It has exactly what you want: hook it up with USB-C, and on the back it has ethernet, three USB-A, audio in and audio out. Fantastic thing. Resolution is 2560x1440. http://images.philips.com/is/image/PhilipsConsumer/258B6QUEB...
But I still think it's a net win because:
- We need to buy and manage fewer cables.
- We'll no longer have the problem of having a free port, but not the right kind.
- When we buy a device, we don't have to decide which ports it should plug into. Like, when I buy a monitor, I don't have to decide whether it should have DisplayPort, HDMI, both or either.
But assuming you're a professional, you either already have a bluetooth mouse/trackpad or you'll want some quality and order a mouse from a reputable brand.
So I have to admit it's indeed very, very slim pickings.
On top of this I find it weird that people say they have to carry 20 Apple branded dongles. Depending on your use-case there is already type-c usb hubs with HDMI Ports, or Ethernet Ports, or both.[1]
The thing is, I love the USB-C TB3 Ports and I love Apple's decision to drag the industry kicking and screaming into a reality where an Office can have a Monitor that is a Thunderbolt 3 Hub, connected with Ethernet and peripherals, that work with both Windows and Mac. This will revolutionize flex-desk setups for big organizations and Co-Workingspaces everywhere. Imo it's worth to have this transition period where people drag a dongle with them to achieve this.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Resolution-Aluminum-MacBook-ChromeBoo...
Belkin, Elgato, OWC and others sell them. I use the Belkin one and it works great.
I don't think this is going to be as big a deal as people say. Honestly, the biggest beef I have is removing the SD card slot, because I do a lot of photo/video work.
I think it depends on the type of user you are. If you're a true "mobile user", it's probably not a big deal, because you put a value on mobility over other stuff.
If you treat your laptop as a "portable desktop", it can get annoying. The ability to not have dongles for everything is one less thing to think about. Yes, it's not the end of the world to have dongles, but if you're used to not needing dongles, being forced to use them is going to make you unhappy.