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Comment by paws | Hacker News Reader

This monitor was Apple's chance to ease the USB-C transition and IMO they blew it.

The previous gen Thunderbolt display effectively brought all the useful ports[1] back to the MacBooks with one cable, and made even the Air viable for a professional. It certainly was a big factor for me back in 2011.

Unfortunately with the current 5k display, the three included ports aren't even USB 3.1 gen 2. Like many other pros, I prefer to have dedicated keyboard/mouse, speakers, and Ethernet, and would have been happy to run a second cable if it brought those things back.

Right now it's looking like our best 'pro 5k' option is duct taping a hub[2] to the back of someone else's display. And it's not clear which hubs support the 15" MBP 87W charging requirement.

Feels like such a missed opportunity.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Apple-MC914LL-27-inch-Thunderbolt-Dis...

[2] https://eshop.macsales.com/preorder/owc-thunderbolt-3-dock/

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> Like many professionals, I prefer to have dedicated keyboard/mouse, speakers, and Ethernet, and would have been happy to run a second cable if it brought those things back.

Each port provides 5V/1.5A; enough for multiple USB-A peripherals on a single port with a USB-C to multi-USB-A. (I have a LG 5K and I use a keyboard, mouse, and microphone on one port; it works great) And USB-C speed (5 Gbps) will not bottleneck data transfer in that case.

Glad that's working nicely for your needs. Are you happy with the display overall?

I agree for the low bandwidth devices you've mentioned it's fine to hang everything off the one line. There is of course a speed hit for higher bandwidth needs[1] e.g. RAID arrays but that was true for the previous gen too.[2]

Nevertheless I still find it a shame we lost the variety of integrated ports from the previous gen. If we have to buy extra dongles anyway I'm equally ready to check out competitor panels.

AFAIK the LG 5k is the only panel offering 87W power output, right?

[1] http://appleinsider.com/articles/17/01/07/review-lg-ultrafin...

[2] http://www.macworld.com/article/1163773/storage/thunderbolt-...

I'm pretty happy with it overall, especially with the current discount. (I do not have the connection issues mentioned in the article)

Worst case for super-high-bandwidth devices you can connect directly to the laptop. (I do not have a external drive bottlenecked by the 5 Gbps limit yet, but may get an external SSD soon / eGPU once that is viable)

> AFAIK the LG 5k is the only panel offering 87W power output, right?

Currently, that is the case. The LG 4k only has 60W output.

I have this 5k monitor. It sits around 30cm from my ASUS 2.4 and 5ghz router. It's connected to my Macbook Pro 2016 15". I connect one USB hub via a USB A to USB C adapter. This hub powers a MIDI keyboard, Native Instruments Maschine, FocusRite Scarlett audio interface, SD cards when I put them in, USB hard drives when I plug them in. The hub hides behind the monitor. I personally love sitting down to work with this monitor each day and I don't understand the arguments against it. There is nothing better on the market today for the spec you get.

> "There is nothing better on the market today for the spec you get."

Aside from the small detail of the monitor getting blown away by a router nearby - a router nearby is not exactly an uncommon occurrence in a computing environment. Not to mention the other issues like possible kernel reboots and flickering caused by unknown factors.

In context, it is a small detail (anyone serious enough buy this monitor and able to afford it will likely be able to relocate their router), and there's still no other 5k option on the market.

Yeah but mine doesn't, so I'm quids in ;)

Nice to hear you have an audio interface working there! Sounds like you do professional audio -- curious what kind of bandwidth needs you're expecting to have?

It's a minor nit, but one reason I prefer Thunderbolt hubs is because they hang directly off the PCI bus.

Historically speaking, with USB the host CPU intermediates all bus traffic. The 'fire' in FireWire (vs e.g. USB2) was how devices could access host memory directly.

It's probably a negligible amount of overhead these days, but my take is, if it's possible to use Thunderbolt and free up CPU cycles for whatever you're doing, why not?

Love to hear opinions from someone who has more recent knowledge on this.

If I'm totally honest, I have no idea what you're talking about :)

I do a lot of audio work for video and composition through Logic using lots of plugins and bits and it just handles it nicely. That's really all I'm bothered about ;)

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