Steam makes it easy for developers to publish cross-platform. It does nothing to make it easy to get your game running on multiple platforms. That's up to your (and your middleware vendor's) developers.
Fair enough, but that won't change the functionality much. You're still going to get more speed than most consumers need today, and you're going to get electrical DP 1.2 that can be easily converted to other things as required.
The main issue with the thing is the single port, which makes the adapter situation much more complex...
Some points there, it's not clear that there are that many consumer devices that would really benefit from a jump from 10 Gbps to 20 Gbps. Consumers might hook up a portable hard disk, and that one might be an SSD, but even then, the extra bandwidth isn't going to help much. In the future, sure, but they'll likely have a newer version of the USB spec by then anyhow.
It's also worth noting that there's nothing stopping you from running Thunderbolt 2 over a USB-C cable: it has enough lanes to do that. If you can do a ~30 Gbps DisplayPort 1.3 connection over USB-C, then Thunderbolt 2 shouldn't be impossible.
Finally, Thunderbolt 3 will probably be dead on arrival, or perhaps relegated to the enterprise and professional niche. It introduces a new connector, and I really doubt that you're going to see TB3 on any consumer notebook or desktop. TB1 and TB2 are already pretty niche in the consumer space (not really used by most people apart from maybe some cheap adapter that could just as easily be done on USB, such as a GigE adapter), due to the huge price premium for TB devices. And I say that as somebody who owns a laptop with a TB1 port:)
Netflix on OS X uses hardware accelerated HTML 5 video, so it's pretty good for battery life. When you combine the fact that you can turn off your laptop's display (or backlight anyhow) while streaming Netflix, you should actually be able to get a bunch longer than the 10 hours the notebook is rated at.
That's not to say that a single USB-C connector isn't dumb. If they just put a second one, you wouldn't need the fancy adapter for that scenario.
Many ultrabooks require adapters to do that. They tend to have things like mini HDMI or micro HDMI or mini displayport, requiring adapters. If you've never seen a laptop with one of those ports as their only video output, then you've not seen many laptops.
Most of those wireless technologies like WiDi are gimmicks, because only a very small percentage of people are going to have the hardware that supports it. We do use wireless projection both in my main job and my volunteer job, but in the first case we're using wireless transmitters that you connect to via HDMI or VGA, and in the second case we're using the projector's built-in network projection support (via our wireless network) which works on any laptop that has the software installed. Downside is that it sucks for anything with motion. Which is fine, because that means it works for us for 90% of the use cases, and we just run an HDMI cable from the table to the HDMI socket we installed in the wall when we need more than that.
I've never seen an enterprise environment that used Barco projectors. That's large-venue stuff... Most of what I see in enterprise is Epson or Dell office-grade projectors.
Then again, most of our meeting rooms at work just use wall-mounted big-screen TVs, although they do use wireless... but you've still got to connect your laptop to the wireless transmitter under the table via VGA or HDMI.
For our convention, in our office, we are using wireless, via the built-in software in the projector. The upside is that the laptops don't need any special hardware to connect, the downside is that it's useless for anything with lots of motion, like video.
And for our convention itself, well, we've dozens of projectors ranging in brightness from ~2k lumen lumen to ~28k lumen per setup, and none of those are doing wireless, it's all HDMI or VGA or HD-SDI...
OK, you should realize that I wasn't arguing that the extra speed that USB 3.1 affords isn't desirable, I was arguing against the absurdity of claiming that running SSDs in RAID-0 was one of the main marketing or design goals for USB 3.1...
USB-C to DisplayPort adapters will be very cheap, because they're almost entirely passive. USB-C supports video by just giving a variable number of pins over to electrical displayport. The only active electronics is for the sideband channels.
Expect Monoprice to be selling one on the cheap soon.
It does. The headphone jack supports microphones (as well as digital optical audio). Plus the thing has a built-in microphone, and most microphones that you're going to want to connect are USB anyhow.
Well, it'll definitely speed the adoption of USB-C, which (when combined with USB 3.1 and DisplayPort alternate mode) is a pretty exciting standard. I think that the change being referred to is reducing ports in favour of wireless connectivity and a smaller number of multi-function ports, though.
Plugging into a projector is always going to require adapters unless you've got a full-sized HDMI or VGA port, and that's not ideal for portability either.
We normally use wireless projection anyhow, and only resort to HDMI when we need high framerates (like for video playback).
USB-C is electrically doing DisplayPort for video (a USB-C to HDMI adapter is sending out DisplayPort and converting it to HDMI). The 1080p limitation comes from the adapter using HDMI 1.x, not any limitation in the notebook or connector itself. Technically USB-C is capable of carrying anything DisplayPort 1.3 supports, which is something like two 4K monitors at 60Hz or even an 8K monitor at 30Hz.
That said, there is probably some maximum resolution supported by the laptop, but I've no idea what it would be. Probably not 1080p.
I'm not sure that I get your point. Very few people are using external SSDs. Practically nil outside of enterprise and professionals. Such rare use cases are certainly not driving the marketing or design of USB 3.1.
Most monitors (laptops or desktop) aren't based on TV resolutions. Valve's hardware survey, for example, shows only ~35% of displays running at 720p, 1080p, or 4k. For example, 1366x768 alone represents around a quarter of displays.
Most computers and most monitors don't support newer versions of HDMI, which means that for refresh rates or resolutions that are higher than what DVI supports DisplayPort is the only option.
In this case, having less ports enabled a smaller laptop, increasing portability. It's up to the individual user's needs to determine if that trade-off is worth it.
More ports is not universally better. If you tried to sell me a laptop that had a full-sized parallel port, for example, I'd say, that's dumb, it's making the laptop way bigger than it needs to be, and I'll never use it.
Apple may have gone too far in that direction (personally I think two USB-C ports and a headphone jack would have been the optimal place), but less ports *can* be better than more ports, depending on the circumstances.
Huh? USB 3.1 uses all four lanes for 10Gbps, but in alternate mode, it's allowing some other protocol to run over those lanes on the electrical level. There's nothing stopping you from running Thunderbolt 2 over a USB-C connector: it has enough lanes/pins to do that. There's even talk of VESA switching to USB-C as the main/official connector for DisplayPort.
You won't need the $80 adapter to get HDMI. There will be third-party adapters that do that very cheaply, because video on USB-C is simply electrically DisplayPort (it's barely more than a passive cable to do USB-C to DisplayPort, the only active electronics are just to fiddle with the sideband channel a bit), so all the same rules about converting from DisplayPort apply: VESA in fact will be insisting that companies make USB-C to HDMI adapters directly, although you could also use a USB-C to DisplayPort adapter and connect a DisplayPort to HDMI adapter to that. There's a very real possibility that VESA may migrate to using USB-C as the native cable for DisplayPort.
Of course, if you want to connect both an HDMI cable *and* charge the laptop at the same time? Well, you won't necessarily need Apple's adapter to do that, but it's still going to cost a bunch more than a simple video adapter.
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.
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).
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Well, 2011 was the year of the Linux Smartphone, since that was the year where Linux smartphone marketshare passed 50%...
Steam makes it easy for developers to publish cross-platform. It does nothing to make it easy to get your game running on multiple platforms. That's up to your (and your middleware vendor's) developers.
Fair enough, but that won't change the functionality much. You're still going to get more speed than most consumers need today, and you're going to get electrical DP 1.2 that can be easily converted to other things as required.
The main issue with the thing is the single port, which makes the adapter situation much more complex...
Some points there, it's not clear that there are that many consumer devices that would really benefit from a jump from 10 Gbps to 20 Gbps. Consumers might hook up a portable hard disk, and that one might be an SSD, but even then, the extra bandwidth isn't going to help much. In the future, sure, but they'll likely have a newer version of the USB spec by then anyhow.
It's also worth noting that there's nothing stopping you from running Thunderbolt 2 over a USB-C cable: it has enough lanes to do that. If you can do a ~30 Gbps DisplayPort 1.3 connection over USB-C, then Thunderbolt 2 shouldn't be impossible.
Finally, Thunderbolt 3 will probably be dead on arrival, or perhaps relegated to the enterprise and professional niche. It introduces a new connector, and I really doubt that you're going to see TB3 on any consumer notebook or desktop. TB1 and TB2 are already pretty niche in the consumer space (not really used by most people apart from maybe some cheap adapter that could just as easily be done on USB, such as a GigE adapter), due to the huge price premium for TB devices. And I say that as somebody who owns a laptop with a TB1 port :)
Netflix on OS X uses hardware accelerated HTML 5 video, so it's pretty good for battery life. When you combine the fact that you can turn off your laptop's display (or backlight anyhow) while streaming Netflix, you should actually be able to get a bunch longer than the 10 hours the notebook is rated at.
That's not to say that a single USB-C connector isn't dumb. If they just put a second one, you wouldn't need the fancy adapter for that scenario.
Many ultrabooks require adapters to do that. They tend to have things like mini HDMI or micro HDMI or mini displayport, requiring adapters. If you've never seen a laptop with one of those ports as their only video output, then you've not seen many laptops.
Most of those wireless technologies like WiDi are gimmicks, because only a very small percentage of people are going to have the hardware that supports it. We do use wireless projection both in my main job and my volunteer job, but in the first case we're using wireless transmitters that you connect to via HDMI or VGA, and in the second case we're using the projector's built-in network projection support (via our wireless network) which works on any laptop that has the software installed. Downside is that it sucks for anything with motion. Which is fine, because that means it works for us for 90% of the use cases, and we just run an HDMI cable from the table to the HDMI socket we installed in the wall when we need more than that.
I've never seen an enterprise environment that used Barco projectors. That's large-venue stuff... Most of what I see in enterprise is Epson or Dell office-grade projectors.
Then again, most of our meeting rooms at work just use wall-mounted big-screen TVs, although they do use wireless... but you've still got to connect your laptop to the wireless transmitter under the table via VGA or HDMI.
For our convention, in our office, we are using wireless, via the built-in software in the projector. The upside is that the laptops don't need any special hardware to connect, the downside is that it's useless for anything with lots of motion, like video.
And for our convention itself, well, we've dozens of projectors ranging in brightness from ~2k lumen lumen to ~28k lumen per setup, and none of those are doing wireless, it's all HDMI or VGA or HD-SDI...
OK, you should realize that I wasn't arguing that the extra speed that USB 3.1 affords isn't desirable, I was arguing against the absurdity of claiming that running SSDs in RAID-0 was one of the main marketing or design goals for USB 3.1...
USB-C to DisplayPort adapters will be very cheap, because they're almost entirely passive. USB-C supports video by just giving a variable number of pins over to electrical displayport. The only active electronics is for the sideband channels.
Expect Monoprice to be selling one on the cheap soon.
It does. The headphone jack supports microphones (as well as digital optical audio). Plus the thing has a built-in microphone, and most microphones that you're going to want to connect are USB anyhow.
1366x768 is 16:9, not 16:10, and has nothing to do with 720p... It's WXGA, the widescreen version of XGA, which is 1024x768.
Well, it'll definitely speed the adoption of USB-C, which (when combined with USB 3.1 and DisplayPort alternate mode) is a pretty exciting standard. I think that the change being referred to is reducing ports in favour of wireless connectivity and a smaller number of multi-function ports, though.
Plugging into a projector is always going to require adapters unless you've got a full-sized HDMI or VGA port, and that's not ideal for portability either.
We normally use wireless projection anyhow, and only resort to HDMI when we need high framerates (like for video playback).
USB-C is electrically doing DisplayPort for video (a USB-C to HDMI adapter is sending out DisplayPort and converting it to HDMI). The 1080p limitation comes from the adapter using HDMI 1.x, not any limitation in the notebook or connector itself. Technically USB-C is capable of carrying anything DisplayPort 1.3 supports, which is something like two 4K monitors at 60Hz or even an 8K monitor at 30Hz.
That said, there is probably some maximum resolution supported by the laptop, but I've no idea what it would be. Probably not 1080p.
I'm not sure that I get your point. Very few people are using external SSDs. Practically nil outside of enterprise and professionals. Such rare use cases are certainly not driving the marketing or design of USB 3.1.
Most monitors (laptops or desktop) aren't based on TV resolutions. Valve's hardware survey, for example, shows only ~35% of displays running at 720p, 1080p, or 4k. For example, 1366x768 alone represents around a quarter of displays.
Most computers and most monitors don't support newer versions of HDMI, which means that for refresh rates or resolutions that are higher than what DVI supports DisplayPort is the only option.
In this case, having less ports enabled a smaller laptop, increasing portability. It's up to the individual user's needs to determine if that trade-off is worth it.
More ports is not universally better. If you tried to sell me a laptop that had a full-sized parallel port, for example, I'd say, that's dumb, it's making the laptop way bigger than it needs to be, and I'll never use it.
Apple may have gone too far in that direction (personally I think two USB-C ports and a headphone jack would have been the optimal place), but less ports *can* be better than more ports, depending on the circumstances.
True, and I'm using it for my 2560x1440@60 monitor. But DVI won't do 120Hz or 144Hz (easy to find at that resolution), and it won't do 4K.
Huh? USB 3.1 uses all four lanes for 10Gbps, but in alternate mode, it's allowing some other protocol to run over those lanes on the electrical level. There's nothing stopping you from running Thunderbolt 2 over a USB-C connector: it has enough lanes/pins to do that. There's even talk of VESA switching to USB-C as the main/official connector for DisplayPort.
It's a mix. Thunderbolt uses the mini displayport connector, which is an Apple standard that they offered royalty free.
You won't need the $80 adapter to get HDMI. There will be third-party adapters that do that very cheaply, because video on USB-C is simply electrically DisplayPort (it's barely more than a passive cable to do USB-C to DisplayPort, the only active electronics are just to fiddle with the sideband channel a bit), so all the same rules about converting from DisplayPort apply: VESA in fact will be insisting that companies make USB-C to HDMI adapters directly, although you could also use a USB-C to DisplayPort adapter and connect a DisplayPort to HDMI adapter to that. There's a very real possibility that VESA may migrate to using USB-C as the native cable for DisplayPort.
Of course, if you want to connect both an HDMI cable *and* charge the laptop at the same time? Well, you won't necessarily need Apple's adapter to do that, but it's still going to cost a bunch more than a simple video adapter.
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.
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).