Does USB Type C Herald the End of Apple's Proprietary Connectors?

An anonymous reader writes The Verge has an interesting editorial about the USB Type C connector on the new Macbook, and what this might mean for Apple's Lightning and Thunderbolt connectors. The former is functionally identical to USB Type C, and the latter has yet to prove popular in the external media and "docking" applications for which it was originally intended. Will Apple phase out these ports in favour of a single, widely-accepted, but novel standard? Or do we face a dystopian future where Apple sells cords with USB Type C on one end, and Lightning on the other?

Comments

Thunderbolt

[adamstew]

Thunderbolt is not a proprietary connector to Apple. It is a standard that Intel has made available and i've seen non-Apple computers with Thunderbolt.

Re:Thunderbolt

[tlhIngan]

I have 2 generic servers in my closet that use Thunderbolt to talk to big ass arrays of disks. Nothing Apple related about them.

And USB 3 does not do everything I use Thunderbolt for on my Mac, including ferry USB3 over the same wire as video. I come home (or go to the office) and plug in my laptop with single cable and instantly my displays, USB3 devices, audio and networking all work ... without eating a ridiculous amount of CPU power as required by USB.

Dear god, do not drop Thunderbolt support based on the silly musings of a bunch of people buying the cheapest crap hardware they can possibly buy and then being pissy they don't have the same functionality. Fortunately Apple doesn't generally listen to a bunch of whiners on slashdot.

Thunderbolt has several advantages over DockPort.

First, it's effectively PCIe - that should already start brewing ideas. Instead of crappy USB-to-serial adapters or parallel adapters that barely work, a Thunderbolt variant would work just like a real connector on your PC (and is practically driverless).

Thunderbolt also has the uncanny ability to hook up huge daisy chains of drives without losing too much speed between the first and last drive - most of the loss in speed comes from having more devices on the line than the actual order of them. If you want to deal with big ass external arrays, Thunderbolt makes that all the more convenient.

Heck, USB generally sucks for storage until you find a matching pair of UAS (USB Attached SCSI) host controllers and drives (which are $$$).

Re:Thunderbolt

[Guspaz]

And USB 3 does not do everything I use Thunderbolt for on my Mac, including ferry USB3 over the same wire as video.

USB-C is in fact USB 3.1, and it very much does ferry USB and video over the same wire. VESA has standardized DisplayPort over USB-C. VESA's press release can be found here: http://www.vesa.org/news/vesa-... or AnandTech had a good article here: http://www.anandtech.com/show/...

and plug in my laptop with single cable and instantly my displays, USB3 devices, audio and networking all work ...

USB 3.1 has the same bandwidth as Thunderbolt 1 (10Gbps), there's no reason why a USB-C dock couldn't do all that, and be much cheaper than a Thunderbolt dock in the process.

USB-C also supports far more power delivery than Thunderbolt. Normal devices get up to 15W (Thunderbolt does ~10W), or devices can draw up to 100W if they implement v2 of the power delivery spec.

Re:Thunderbolt

[rahvin112]

Thunderbolt is never going to be popular. Intel charges almost $50 per port. USB on the other hand can be had for pennies.

Re:Thunderbolt

[Guspaz]

USB 3.1's alt mode does not encapsulate anything, nor does it use USB signalling. It dynamically gives one, two, or four of the high-speed lanes over to the alternate protocol, letting that protocol use it's own signalling. As such, a USB-C connector and cable can support full-bandwidth DisplayPort 1.3, with all features, while still carrying USB power and USB 2.0 (since those are always reserved). In practice, you're unlikely to need more than two lanes, because that's enough to deliver 4K at 60Hz, and you still get half of the USB 3.1 bandwidth (plus USB 2 and power).

Re:Another failure

[Lunix Nutcase]

Did you forget your sarcasm tag? Since when has DisplayPort "failed"? Every single Dell monitor, for example, comes with both full-size and mini Displayport ports. Also, Thunderbolt is Intel's standard not Apple's.

Re:Depends where's the money

[ArhcAngel]

For anyone who might have had a doubt...The new MacBook (MSRP $1300.00) requires an $80 dongle to connect to anything.

Re:In contrast to DockPort

[Guspaz]

Even if the specification did not provide power in and of itself, its use of the PCI-E bus does require it to provide power over its lanes. In fact, one of the advantages of Thunderbolt when it first came out was providing twice as much power as the fastest USB at the time. Thunderbolt 2 provide at least double that amount of power when it was released.

Thunderbolt's spec most certainly does account for power. It has a pin specifically for power, and is rated for 550mA at 18V, or around 10W. Both Thunderbolt 1 and 2 offer the same amount of power, since all thunderbolt 2 did was add channel aggregation to let one device use both channels.

For its part, USB 3.1 offers 15W of power by default, going up to 100W of power with optional specs. Thunderbolt 3 also offers 100W of power, but it may be dead on arrival considering that USB-C is more likely to hit mass adoption, and TB3 uses a new connector that is not backwards compatible without adapters.

A big thing USB 3.1 is touting is the ability to tie two SSDs together in a RAID 0 configuration and not max out its bandwidth.

Nobody is touting that. SSDs in RAID is going to be a niche use at best. Most people are going to be connecting simple flash drives, and very few of those come close to even maxing out USB 3.