Comment by revelation | Hacker News Reader

Comment by revelation | Hacker News Reader

That's just the start of it. So the new MBP has what, four USB-C ports.

Can I put power into all of them? What if I try to do 4xHDMI for all of them? Surely I can't connect four external graphics cards over Thunderbolt 3? Can I chain Thunderbolt devices?

The author also missed the "audio accessory mode". That's right, in some unique star constellation, some of these USB-C pins can be repurposed for pumping out analog audio! Supported? Who knows.

I think before long every USB-C accessory will have to come with some sort of EEPROM that the host reads first to figure out 1) what is this you are plugging in and 2) is this going to work. So that there is at least some user feedback instead of "plain doesn't work" or "oopsie now the port is dead".

They already should [0]

> All USB-C to USB-C cables are considered full-featured USB Type-C cables and must be active, electronically marked cables that contain a chip with an ID function based on the configuration channel and vendor-defined messages (VDMs) from the USB Power Delivery 2.0 specification.

[0] : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USB_Type-C

The answers to all of the questions in your second paragraph are easily available and in most cases the answer is yes (you can do 4x HDMI if they're 4K or less on the 15", 2k on the 13" - video card limitation, not port limitation).

[1] http://www.apple.com/macbook-pro/specs/

It says two displays for both, so the answer is no. I'm not sure a user is particularly interested in the video vs port distinction.

Also says nothing on the four external graphic cards, but frankly the answer is probably going to be no as well.

That's the principal problem here: there is now a port for things that the underlying hardware can't even offer.

> Can I put power into all of them?

Yes though it will only charge from one of them. A neat consequence of this is you can now connect multiple power supplies for redundancy. Not at all important for most people but there are some scenarios where it's nice feature to have available.

Crap. I missed that. You're right.

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