Apple Begins Selling Standalone 2-Meter Thunderbolt 3 Pro Cable for $129

[throAU]

Hopefully comes with a jar of Vaseline at that price...

40 gigabit over copper is a "hard" problem with todays tech. This is cheap compared to other copper cables that do anywhere near that bandwidth over that distance (e.g., from the enterprise networking world).

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This is what I hate about Apple, they say they're all about making insanely great products, yet when push comes to shove, they seem to be more about making insanely great profits.

As above, go find another cable that does 40 gig over 2 metres that isn't fibre. In fact, go try and do it via fibre for that matter - you'll be paying for optical transceivers at each end then and the price will go up.

This is not a straightforward thing thunderbolt is doing here, and the price reflects that.

It isn't expensive because apple tax, it is expensive because the technology involved isn't cheap/mainstream yet.

 

[joevt]

40 gigabit over copper is a "hard" problem with todays tech.

It's two lanes of 20.625 Gbps in each direction. I guess your comment still applies.

 

[sjinsjca]

But yeah, as an electronics engineer I do not have a glimpse of what you´re writing here... sure.

As an electronics engineer, you may not have a glimpse into what's required to manufacture a photonic cable. If that's what this is.

As it turns out, I do. It's a costly, precision process (getting the optical fibers in the cables just-so with respect to the VCSELs and photodiodes in the connectors is a highly specialized operation requiring sub-micron accuracies), and there are yield issues with current manufacturing approaches. Just a few manufacturers have figured out how to do it profitably, and scaling volume is its own challenge.

(If this cable isn't photonic, the next one will be. It's a happening technology, related to recent data-center connectivity approaches but obviously quite different for consumer and business applications. But there is some convergence going on, and the needs are the same: higher and higher speeds over practical lengths.)

 

[joevt]

The description of Thunderbolt 4 cables seems to match the capabilities of this Apple Pro cable? (see image 2 of 5 at :
https://www.tomshardware.com/news/intel-announces-thunderbolt-4-specification )
Basically, it works with any USB-C signal type (except Virtual Link and HDMI I guess). Well, we don't know if it works with USB4 signals yet (which use 10 and 20 Gbps instead of 10.3125 and 20.625 Gbps).

 

[Larsvonhier]

As an electronics engineer, you may not have a glimpse into what's required to manufacture a photonic cable. If that's what this is.

As it turns out, I do. It's a costly, precision process (getting the optical fibers in the cables just-so with respect to the VCSELs and photodiodes in the connectors is a highly specialized operation requiring sub-micron accuracies), and there are yield issues with current manufacturing approaches. Just a few manufacturers have figured out how to do it profitably, and scaling volume is its own challenge.

(If this cable isn't photonic, the next one will be. It's a happening technology, related to recent data-center connectivity approaches but obviously quite different for consumer and business applications. But there is some convergence going on, and the needs are the same: higher and higher speeds over practical lengths.)

A few too many "ifs" and speculation for my taste. May turn out not to be opto-electronic, just plain copper.
We´ll see...

 

[throAU]

To update this (for comparison), I just recently got some 2M QSFP+ cables to do 40-100 gigabit over 2 metres for my new datacenter switching.

These were DELL cables and cost ~$150 Australian each at a pretty steep discount.

And these are network only, not multi-purpose and capable of DisplayPort, etc. as well.