A Look Inside Apple's $130 USB-C Cable [video] (2023) | Hacker News Reader

A Look Inside Apple's $130 USB-C Cable [video] (2023)

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Bunch of guys justifying price of overpriced cable and comparing it with regular usb cable as it was apple to apple (see the pun here? ;-) ) claiming that they are advertising something else :-)

Putting aside everything above - making an every day use cable cost 130USD is not an example of good engineering, it is example of very bad engineering.

IIRC this is not your standard USB cable. This is a 40Gbps cable used for connecting things like graphics cards.

Exactly, one Apple Thunderbolt 4 cable can drive 2x 4K monitors in a daisy chain configuration.

Years ago I was driving 2 4k monitors using a TB3 cable that cost maybe $20-$30, so this one kinda seems like overkill. Granted, those monitors were plugged into a TB dock separately instead of daisy-chained, but there was only one cable between my laptop and the dock so it seems like the bandwidth was already adequate?

How much did your TB dock cost?

It's been a while so I don't remember exactly, but I'd guess in the $150-$250 range. Before the inevitable comparison to the $130 cable I should point out that the dock was for more than just connecting to displays (IIRC SD card reader, audio, and a shitload of USB-A and a handful of -C ports. And presumably the cable that came with the dock would work directly with daisychainable 4k monitors... Although the display stuff was confusing. At the time it was a pain in the ass to find a dock that explicitly saod it could drive multiple 4k monitors without having to fall back to 30hz

I might be wrong, but I thought Thunderbolt 3|4 cables are not the same as USB cables at all, and the terms can't be used interchangeably. TB3/4 use the USB-C connector, but that's it.

You didn't get my pun :) I do understand that this is 40Gbps cable :)

It is also long, the 6ft one is $129 and the 10ft one is $159. Most USB4 cables are below 3ft and get expensive as they get longer. It is nice that there are longer ones cause longer USB3 cables were rare.

Apple's are twice as expensive as other manufacturers.

Wouldn't Apple be the cheapest among all manufacturers offering 10ft long certified 40Gbps cables?

I'm doing exactly that with $25 cable and it works just fine at 40 Gbps.

Is it 10 feet long?

Yes. You can buy thunderbolt 3 cables (usb-c 40gb/s) for 60-65€ that are 2m long.

I like apple but this is ridiculous

This is a sponsored video from Lumafield, accompanying the article that HN discussed previously three months ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37929338 (218 comments)

Just about every article showing this xray stuff is a Lumafield ad essentially

That’s fine, just repeating what’s in the description.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com