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Apple Now Selling Longer 3-Meter Thunderbolt 4 Pro Cable for Studio Display
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What do you think this particular technology should cost, and what’s your engineering solution to bend the laws of physics that drives the complexity of pushing data like this at these lengths?
By all means, show us a cheaper 3m cable than Apple’s.
On the scale of things the world has gone bonkers over, a $159 cable is not even in the Top 100.
Because it says Apple on it. They set the price on their products. If that’s too much or the 3rd party cables are just as good, then buy the 3rd party cable. I generally don’t buy Apple’s cables, I buy Anker, Plugable and Cable Matters cables and haven’t had any issues. I do own an Apple Thunderbolt 3 cable that seems to work better than the one that came with my Asus XG-Station Pro eGPU. Cables cost money, but there are bargains and excellent 3rd party cables, so what’s the fuss that Apple charges $160?
PS-Good luck finding a 3m cable from anyone else for the next 6-12 months.
I was talking about about that guy's comment, that wasn't based on reality. Nothing to do with the captain obvious "Apple set the price on their products" complete non sequitur, nor whether Apple does or doesn't do a 3m one. ?
Again can you not read or something... I asked about the **2m** cable, not the 3m one. ?
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And the news is about the 3m cable, not the 2m one.
What's the point on saying "but there are 2m cables that are cheaper" on an article talking about a 3m cable that just came out to meet this specific need?
Please read the title and stay on topic
We can read, you’re just unaware or being purposely ignorant of the technical hurdles involved in making this kind of connection move further over copper. Hence the reason all the cheap cables are 2 M, and no one has released a longer one besides Apple.
Thunderbolt 4 Explained | Eaton
Thunderbolt 4, the latest connectivity standard from Intel, gives you fast data transfer, high-resolution video and charging, all at the same time. If you're thinking about buying a Thunderbolt 4 laptop, read this first!
Man, it’s really weird that the SPEC itself guarantees transmission rates *up to a maximum length*. Wouldn’t that be incredibly weird? After all, everyone just knows that you can just make wires longer and there’s no engineering ramifications to that when dealing with data transmission.
The tech is at the edge of what’s possible, physically, with electrical signals carrying data in this format. Then there’s the many transport formats using similar but unequal cables making it even messier.
Thunderbolt was originally supposed to be optical, but they wanted to “price reduce” it and have power in the cable. An optical and electrical connector and cable combo would’ve solved the distance and power problems. The expense problem seems to never have been solved, and cables themselves are now stupidly expensive because of needing transceivers in the ends.
It seems pathological.
We have overcomplicated, highly fragile (low tolerance for being off-spec in manufacturing and implementation/usage) tech all over the place. The complexity continues to grow. None of this seems to be getting better with “better” technology. And that’s not even including the egregious state of cultural and illegal tolerance for flaws in software.
Edit: The expense of Thunderbolt was shifted from the manufacturers of the hardware with Thunderbolt chipsets & sockets onto the customers of the hardware by shifting the expense to the cables.
These prices are absolutely ludicrous, even if it’s braided and thunderbolt 3 capable there’s no way a cable should cost this much.
Good thing you can go for an alternative… if anything ever happens to my pack in cable I sure as hell won’t be buying one of these
Like yeah I understand these cables are super fancy and all but do you NEED all that stuff inside for the cable to work?
If I get a 2m OWC cable for 60 bucks instead of an Apple 1.8m cable for 159 bucks am I gonna notice any difference whatsoever?
Good thing you can go for an alternative… if anything ever happens to my pack in cable I sure as hell won’t be buying one of these
Like yeah I understand these cables are super fancy and all but do you NEED all that stuff inside for the cable to work?
If I get a 2m OWC cable for 60 bucks instead of an Apple 1.8m cable for 159 bucks am I gonna notice any difference whatsoever?
Did you miss the part where I was talking about the 1.8m cable?
I understand the headline only mentions the 3m one but if you actually read the article it mentions the 1.8m one is $120, which is double the price of the OWC one.
I know right. People are often deliberately facetious. You explain the pro-rata pricing for the 1.8m one vs 2m from other quality brands, but what can you do when they have their 'blinded by the Apple packaging' goggles on, despite technical explanations. Oh, it's braided, so wunderbar, take double my money Apple. ?
Even Apple can't be bothered to explain why their TB4 "Pro" 1.8m cable is any different to other quality 2m Intel Certified ones on the spec pages. No wonder, when there isn't any difference in technical ability whatsoever – oh, hang-on it's braided, so must be worth over double the price then. ?
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The 2m one forms part of the actual article. ?
Perhaps you can't read yet, so I'll give you a pass on being deliberately pestilent. ?
It depends on how you use it. If you plan on plugging it on a desktop computer and letting it behind your desk, then the cable quality doesn't matter indeed.
But if you plan on using it with a laptop with frequent connection / disconnection, then it matters, not only the braiding but also the quality of the connectors themselves. On the Amazon comments of these alternatives, I've seen some people complaining about the low durability of these cables when used frequently.
It's important if you always push them to the max (like using 100W power + data for 5K/6K monitor simultaneously).
It’s the smugness that gets to me lol
If the reply had been just “yeah but Apple is the only one that sells a 3m cable and the price is justified by the complexity of internals required to maintain connectivity up to Tb4 standards in such a length” It still would have missed my point but at least it would have been a good argument.
Instead it’s just “LINK PLEASE TO “ALTERNATIVE” 3m CABLE”. It’s the same energy of the “Checkmate Christians” posts on the Reddit of yore
Silver and gold aren't cheap, besides all of that shielding and the circuitry. HDMI cables with silver, no gold or circuitry are right in that ball park. Quality and reliability cost.
Do you need THAT much gold for cables tho?
Serious question
Like, if OWC can pull it off for half the price and still be up to spec what’s going on in there?
It’s not like I’m not aware premium cables aren’t a thing, I know about shielding and all that stuff but at the end of the day I can’t justify spending 120 dollars for a cable when one that’s half the price will do the job just perfectly.
I haven’t had a single problem going with cheaper HDMI cables.
At least we can all agree 20k diamond HDMI cables are a scam… right?
Pretty much. Like I said above, where's Apple's explanation for the Pro branding on these? They haven't really been forthcoming in offering any explanations, which is strange when you consider the pricing here.
There's something different (worse) on Apple's cables vs. other TB4 cables. The Apple cables don't support connection to non-Apple hardware source devices.
It remains be to see if the differences will ultimately translate into something unique/beneficial to Apple products vs. standard certified TB4 versions.