Apple Plans To Launch an 'All-New' 16-inch MacBook Pro and 32-inch 6K Monitor This Year, Says Report (theverge.com)

Apple is planning an "all-new" MacBook Pro design for this year, well-connected analyst Ming-Chi Kuo has said. From a report: The lineup is reportedly led by a model with a screen of between 16 and 16.5 inches, which would make it the biggest screen in a Mac notebook since the 17-inch models stopped being sold in 2012. Kuo says the lineup may also include a 13-inch model with support for 32GB of RAM; right now only the 15-inch MacBook Pro can be configured with that amount of memory.

[...] More interestingly, Kuo has the first credible details of the external monitor that will mark Apple's return to the pro display market. It's said to be a 31.6-inch 6K display with a "Mini LED-like backlight design." Apple discontinued its last monitor, the Thunderbolt Display, back in 2016; right now the best option for owners of more modern Macs is the Apple-sanctioned but imperfect 27-inch LG UltraFine 5K.

Comments

Re:Do it, Apple!

[blindseer]

No wired network is a killer in some settings.

I agree. What bothers me is the increasing lack of Ethernet ports and no support for an inexpensive alternative. All it would take is the small step of support for USB to USB networking with a passive cable. This was written in the USB spec 10 years ago, but it seems few people bothered to implement it. It's in section 5.5.2 of the USB 3.0 whitepaper.

https://www.usb3.com/whitepape...

Apple doesn't have this problem because they have USB-C ports on all new computers and support networking over a passive cable by use of the Thunderbolt protocol. An inexpensive passive cable will connect two Apple computers at 10 Gbps. A wired network does not necessarily mean Ethernet.

I guess if Apple supported this kind of connection with USB 3.0 it might go just as fast, and be able to connect to any computer with a USB-A port with a widely available an inexpensive USB-A to USB-C cable, but then the other computer would have to support this as well. There's little incentive by Apple to support this if Windows and Linux can't be bothered to support a direct PC to PC connection by USB.

Oh, and if you really needed to have Ethernet to connect by a wire to another computer then there's all kinds of adapters out there for this. Given the increasing scarcity of Ethernet ports on new Windows computers, especially laptops and tablets, the need for such an adapter is shared with Apples. But, again, I can connect two new Apple computers together at 10 Gbps with a $10 cable I can get at most any Best Buy, Wal-Mart, or whatever. I can't do this with Windows or Linux, or at least I haven't seen it yet.

I'd like to be able to do the same with Windows and Linux. Why after 10 years has no one bothered to read the USB spec and implement a very useful wired connection between PCs? Seems to me that there would be no hardware limitation for this, all we need is the software. Has no third party read this either and seen the possibilities?