Sidebar Sidebar
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

Acer and Lenovo Debut First USB-C Monitors, Compatible With Retina MacBook

soupcan said:
Now for some 5K Thunderbolt display and some Apple-built ultra wide 21:9 monitors. With a curved option, of course.
Click to expand...

Never mind how much more space gets eaten up by content made for higher resolution displays (with or without fancy bourgeois names) that result in big bloaty files that eat up 16Gb in a hurry, require more bandwidth to download or update and we don't have unlimited bandwidth quotas, becomes pointless depending on how small the screen is or how far away you're going to look at it, etc, here's the skinny on the other modern must-have issue: how pointless curved displays really are one the cajoling is overlooked in favor of fact:

http://www.rtings.com/tv/learn/curved-vs-flat-tvs-compared?uxtv=97b6

Do people just swallow the hype, or disregard critics who point out that the marketing is just a myth to screw over customers with? Ethics, thy country ain't America anymore...
 
Meanwhile, Apple still offers this thing with 3 cables, a design thicker than a whole iMac, for the price of a whole iMac. Add an overpriced adapter to this if you want to use it with the MacBook.
MC914_AV1
 
  • Like
Reactions: TechZeke, Digital Skunk, appledefenceforce and 11 others
teslo said:
every once in a while i step back and look at something like the top graphic (macbook, iPhone, iPad and monitors) and make sure to still be amazed at the digital age we live in. i daydreamed as a kid in the early 80s about gaming in the palm of your hand that would look as good as saturday morning cartoons - or 'books' that would open and show you any picture or movie you could imagine. and i really didn't think it was even possible.

look at that graphic!

Oh, and RE: the article... usb-c seems nice but the next adoption i hope to invest in is wireless. the 80s kid in me will probably explode. apple may see a bright future in usb-c but if the competition (and third party peripherals) keeps them on their toes, it'll hopefully be short-lived. i get the appeal, but to me it's just a band-aid over the problem of snaking wires everywhere. still need a hub. still need to plug them all in centimeters from your computer. no bueno.
Click to expand...

I think the MacBook shows that Apple's vision is a wireless future. Just right now, you need a port for charging. And if you're going to add a port, make it versatile.
 
  • Like
Reactions: Daekwan
baryon said:
Meanwhile, Apple still offers this thing with 3 cables, a design thicker than a whole iMac, for the price of a whole iMac. Add an overpriced adapter to this if you want to use it with the MacBook.
MC914_AV1
Click to expand...

The display is so behind in terms of tech I find it amazing Apple still sells it! If they weren't interested in displays, why not discontinue it? If they are interested in displays, why not release a 4K display along side the Mac Pro? Or a 5K display along side the Retina iMac?
 
  • Like
Reactions: appledefenceforce
its seems all too easy to rat out the one company we buy Apple products from when there are alternatives :)

I like these Acer monitors...Lenovo monitors look good too, but i draw the line at their Laptops, after the Superfish.. All it takes is a company to do this "once" to never trust them again, regardless weather they claim is.
 
  • Like
Reactions: appledefenceforce
Elijen said:
Meanwhile in the Apple HQ:
Compatible peripherals starting to come out? It's about time to change port type again!
Click to expand...

Apple's hardly unique in playing that hidden market game and, sometimes, changes or improvements to technology are rightly justified and not a pyramid scheme game at customer expense. But given Apple and its customers love how tightly integrated the architecture is supposed to be, those new cable (or other component) designs have a habit of compelling all to upgrade or get thrown under the bus. No pun intended, if you're a techie or have basic knowledge of basic computing concepts or technology (and not the hipster-appeasing, dumbed-down colloquialism, "tech")...
 
Speaking of Thunderbolt 3 bandwidth, I tried to run the numbers as best as I could, and even without any form of audio and no FaceTime HD camera, a Retina 5k Display with a Gigabit Ethernet jack and three USB-C Rev. 2 ports would require 57.54 Gbps. Even using USB-C Rev. 1 or USB 3 instead would require 42.54 Gbps, just 2.54 Gbps more than is available.
 
Last edited:
lincolntran said:
When I first heard about "the internet"....I was thinking to myself: "I can communicate with someone on the other side of the globe? Wow!". I also used to wish "if only I can talk to anyone around the world and see their faces too". I didn't think Those two things were possible in my life time or at least able to afford it....It seems silly now...
Click to expand...
I used to think, "Wow! I can see the future where there will be an 'I Love Lucy' channel, where you could watch whatever 'Lucy' episode you wanted." (this was in 1976, when we got cable.

Then came Netflix.

I'm going to ask my younger kids (aged 10, 7, and 6) what they envision, and marvel at how soon it comes true.
 
  • Like
Reactions: appledefenceforce
Meanwhile Apple continues to sell its technologically rusty display for nearly $1000. Embarrassing and frustrating for us Apple fans. Who would by one even 6 month ago? Maybe Apple will finally update or mercifully kill it very soon.
 
H2SO4 said:
BOOM. This!!!!
It won’t happen though and I’ll buy an LG instead, (see below……).
Click to expand...
sir just buy the damn monitor right i have mine since august and can't live with out it. All other monitors are put to shame by that lovely curved 34 inch beast.
 
thermodynamic said:
Never mind how much more space gets eaten up by content made for higher resolution displays (with or without fancy bourgeois names) that result in big bloaty files that eat up 16Gb in a hurry, require more bandwidth to download or update and we don't have unlimited bandwidth quotas, becomes pointless depending on how small the screen is or how far away you're going to look at it, etc, here's the skinny on the other modern must-have issue: how pointless curved displays really are one the cajoling is overlooked in favor of fact:

http://www.rtings.com/tv/learn/curved-vs-flat-tvs-compared?uxtv=97b6

Do people just swallow the hype, or disregard critics who point out that the marketing is just a myth to screw over customers with? Ethics, thy country ain't America anymore...
Click to expand...
Monitors aren't TVs. For TVs a curve is pretty useless, but for a monitor it's not since you're sitting way closer.
 
  • Like
Reactions: jedifaka
Mac 128 said:
I'm actually surprised Apple hasn't released a new retina Thunderbolt Display yet. They're already making the panels for the 27" iMac.
Click to expand...

Not going to happen until there are Macs supporting either USB-C with DisplayPort 1.3 or Thunderbolt 3. Otherwise you'll need two cables. I'd guess that they'll stick with Thunderbolt, but who knows...?

KPOM said:
I wonder if Apple will produce a Thunderbolt Display using Thunderbolt 3, or a USB-C 3.1 Gen 2 display (obviously they'll come up with a better name, or resurrect the Cinema Display name). If they do the latter, it will work with the existing MacBook, as well as any future Mac they produce with either USB-C or Thunderbolt 3, while still improving throughput over USB 3.1 Gen 1/USB 3.0.
Click to expand...

OK - here's the complication as I understand it:

DisplayPort 1.2 needs two cables to drive a 5k display.

USB-C supports (at least in theory) DisplayPort 1.3, which can drive 5k over a single cable.
Pro: its electrically compatible with DisplayPort - the high-speed data wires in the connector switch to DisplayPort mode
Con: At 5k, only the legacy USB 2 pins are left for data, so you won't want to chain high-bandwidth stuff off the display.
Con: The GPU needs to support DisplayPort 1.3 (not sure if any of the current Intel GPUs offer this?)
Con: the rMB certainly can't support 5k this way.

Thunderbolt 3 only supports DisplayPort 1.2 - but it can send two DP 1.2 cables-worth of data down a single TB cable and support 5k that way.
Pro: Don't need a DP1.3 GPU
Pro: (I suspect) there's a bit more bandwidth left for daisy-chained devices
Con: In this mode, the signal isn't electrically compatible with DisplayPort: its Thunderbolt, and the display has to be a thunderbolt display, with a TB3 controller chip to split off the displayport data.

Now, I'm assuming that the existing 'legacy mode' of Thunderbolt, whereby you can plug a DisplayPort device into a TB 1 or 2 socket and it morphs into a DisplayPort will be subsumed by USB-C's similar, but more flexible, trick whereby some of the physical data lines switch to DisplayPort mode. However, TB3 has only talked about DP 1.2 support - if the TB3 chipset can't deal with DP1.3 at all - even in 'legacy' mode - then you've got a messy situation whereby, when it comes to 5k support, TB3 isn't quite a proper USB-C port and can only use Thunderbolt 5k displays as opposed to the (doubtless) forthcoming 5k USB-C displays.
 
jamescharley22 said:
That sounds right, but what I was talking about, and it's not your fault you're not aware of this because this happened in another thread, is I expressed my desire for all Thunderbolt 3 ports in a super-thin MacBook Pro, and someone replied that they wanted TB 3 ports and USB-C ports. On this hypothetical super-thin MacBook Pro, I wanted all TB 3 ports because they were natively backwards compatible with USB-C, the other person didn't understand that and kept campaigning for TB 3 and USB-C.

Someone else commented that they would like a MacBook Pro with a tapered unibody like the Air. They wanted USB 3 (Type-A), TB 3, and USB-C. I again replied to them that they should use USB 3 (Type-A; they had an argument that they wouldn't be able to use existing USB peripherals, a plausible situation that I can see warranting the original connector but I also argued that holding on to potential legacy technologies will slow emerging spec markets) and TB 3, but they also didn't grasp that TB 3 can do USB-C without any adapters and campaigned for all three.

I'm in favor of using the USB-C connector as foundation for TB 3 because it still promotes the USB-C accessory market, it'll make things look tidier on future machines by having one less type of port, and the backwards compatibility will be really convenient.
Click to expand...

The problem with all this is that Apple likes to consolidate and kill products with no warning, leaving some users in the dust of the "new".

This is why I'm still holding on to my 2012 and 2011 Macs... I'm waiting for the dust to settle while remaining functional in the current environment I need to exist in.
 
I'm here for this. Apple is moving too slow for my taste on these monitors. Why spend 1k on old tech?
 
Last edited:
So they can make a monitor with pass through charging but not a single USB hub with it in the past 6 months?
 
teslo said:
every once in a while i step back and look at something like the top graphic (macbook, iPhone, iPad and monitors) and make sure to still be amazed at the digital age we live in. i daydreamed as a kid in the early 80s about gaming in the palm of your hand that would look as good as saturday morning cartoons - or 'books' that would open and show you any picture or movie you could imagine. and i really didn't think it was even possible..
Click to expand...

Hm. I daydreamed that we'd have engineered human hunger and poverty out and implemented those solutions, and enjoy lives of relative ease thanks to technology, begun repairing the damage our youthful exuberance and ignorance caused the rest of the world, and moved on to all be regularly shuttling out to a busy space station, and from there departing for construction operations & research work on the lunar surface and out to other planets and moons and stations.

Instead we seem to have gotten the opposite of all those things, and our vision seems limited to a perpetual state of war and a string of electronic toys promoting escapism to avoid dealing with reality.

Guess I'm not sold on the tradeoff being worth it.
 
Last edited:
  • Like
Reactions: Kiro and teslo
theluggage said:
Now, I'm assuming that the existing 'legacy mode' of Thunderbolt, whereby you can plug a DisplayPort device into a TB 1 or 2 socket and it morphs into a DisplayPort will be subsumed by USB-C's similar, but more flexible, trick whereby some of the physical data lines switch to DisplayPort mode. However, TB3 has only talked about DP 1.2 support - if the TB3 chipset can't deal with DP1.3 at all - even in 'legacy' mode - then you've got a messy situation whereby, when it comes to 5k support, TB3 isn't quite a proper USB-C port and can only use Thunderbolt 5k displays as opposed to the (doubtless) forthcoming 5k USB-C displays.
Click to expand...

Interesting. The producer of the KickStarter project Hydradock said that the DP port won't work properly if the Hydradock is plugged into a Dell XPS 13 (which has a Thunderbolt 3 port in addition to 2 USB-A). Dell does sell a USB-C adapter that outputs to USB-A (3.0), HDMI, VGA, and Ethernet (but does not have pass-through charging). I'm guessing that, at least with the chipset Dell is using, Thunderbolt 3 doesn't natively support all the standard modes of USB-C 3.1 Gen 1.

The 2015 MacBook uses a standard USB-C port running standard USB 3.1 Gen 1 (including Power Delivery 2.0). I doubt Apple would go with a single port in the future that is not industry standard. TB3 is an alternate mode. It's possible that Thunderbolt 3 never makes it to the MacBook (future versions could get USB 3.1 Gen 2 or later generations for faster throughput), but the MacBook Pro gets a Thunderbolt 3 port with the next refresh. The MacBook isn't really meant to drive lots of peripherals.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.
Top Bottom
Back