5 ms·

Apple's $130 Thunderbolt 4 cable could be worth it, as seen in X-ray CT scans

27 points by CharlesW 3y ago

ChrisArchitect 3y ago
[dupe] More discussion earlier over here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37929338 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37929338
- CharlesW 3y ago
  Related, not a dupe.
jauntywundrkind 3y ago
I'd love to see a comparison that included another active USB4 cable. The original post felt like it picked absolutely awful comparison targets, just totally different classes of devices. The other cables had nowhere near similar capabilities. But there's plenty of sub $50 reasonably well known brands that have active USB4/tb4 cables that they could have compared against that would have been actually interesting to see.
lsllc 3y ago
Wow, that's some incredible imaging. iFixit should get one of those CT scanners for disassembly-free teardown.
mensetmanusman 3y ago
In which profession does this cable add $130 of value in time saved?
- jdlshore 3y ago
  A profession that needs a cable longer than 1 meter with full bandwidth and power. (This one is 3 meters.) Active cables are much more complicated and expensive than passive cables, and full bandwidth, full power cables even more so.
- mwint 3y ago
  If you’re serious - any profession in which you’re paid $x/hr, and a cheap knockoff cable could fail and burn 130/x hours of time. Extra worth it because Murphy’s law will make it fail at the worst possible moment. Or more likely, your cheap knockoff cable works well enough except when Joe from accounting is warming his Chef Boyardee in the microwave across the building. That kind of intermittent heisenbug can stealthily burn dozens of valuable hours and not show up on any accounting line.
  - lloeki 3y ago
    I recently bought a 5 bay 10Gbps USB-C hard disk enclosure. Most of the reviews were very good, a few mentioned that they had slow speeds, weird disconnects, data corruption. Plugged the thing in with two 16TB disks on a Linux machine, and proceeded to test the disks / enclosure to make sure disks were fine before moving any serious data on those - sometimes you get duds or they get damaged during transport - and that the setup was stable and performant enough for my needs. Well, after a few TBs written it looked like one of the two disks was having write timeouts, operations hanged SMART counters were going up like crazy. It really looked like one of the disks had damage from transport. Tried it again just to be sure and now it was the second disk, with the first one being perfectly fine! More tests showed that the failure was fairly random. So, buggy enclosure? Well, out of a link I tried the other cable (USB-C <-> USB-A) that came with the enclosure. That was slower, but writing was all fine. Tried the original C-C and errors came up again. I had other C-C cables around of various but not spectacular quality, all of them were showing various issues, some even failing right on USB enumeration. Ultimately I decided to not cheap out and find a good cable, and I had an Apple TB3 cable - which does support USB 3.2 2x2 - for some reason that I didn't try as I wanted to keep it for something else. It's been rock solid and plenty fast. My guess is that root cause was interference with other cables unable to cope at higher speeds.
- rbanffy 3y ago
  If, for instance, you work with very large files on a desktop storage array (music or video editing, VFX, etc), it's easy to assume the $5 cable would be limiting your transfer rates. In that case, buying a $130 cable might be the same as upgrading your disk array.
- obenn 3y ago
  One example would be anybody who deals with lots of data transfer, like video editing. Accelerating that with a better cable can really add up.
  - eqvinox 3y ago
    The cable can't accelerate data transfers. Either it works, or it doesn't¹. If it works, it works at full speed. The bit specific to this Apple cable is that it does TB4 at 3m. That's not possible without active electronics to regenerate the signal in the cable; the maximum length for a passive cable is 2m. Passive 2m cables can be had for about $30 (noname) to $70 (non-Apple quality brand). Fun fact: if you integrate optical transceivers, the cable can essentially be arbitrary length. (Though at some point you run into problems due to neither hardware nor software being built to work with the built-up latency.) [¹ - for the sake of completeness, yes, these cables can partially fail with either sporadic bit errors or breaking one of the lanes. Both of these failure modes are extremely rare.]
- neom 3y ago
  Shooting tethered in film or photography maybe? (although 3m isn't really long enough for tethered work) https://www.hasselblad.com/h-system/h6d-400c-multi-shot/ https://www.hasselblad.com/h-system/h6d-400c-multi-shot/ (I believe the files are about 2.5gigs a pop) https://www.red.com/v-raptor-xl-black?quantity=1&vxlpackage=3 https://www.red.com/v-raptor-xl-black?quantity=1&vxlpackage=...
- javchz 3y ago
  I think Media Production and corporate docks are nice candidate. Displayport indocks are awesome.
- climb_stealth 3y ago
  I can see myself buying something like that. Just to have the assurance of getting a genuine and decent cable. Because third party cabling is a shitshow. And it's the kind of thing I would buy once and then it lives with the computer and screen setup that stays unchanged for years.
- atoav 3y ago
  As we go into higher frequency (=speed) territory with our cables we will have more expensive cables and it will become harder to build and test them. A decent 4k hdmi cable tester costs 10k€ Whether the pricetag is worth the speed depends entirely on your use case. If you are offloading on a film set where each non-productive hour costs you multiple thousand euros, getting a cable that can do it faster can become economic pretty fast.
asicsarecool 3y ago
The amount of time and care it takes me to design 10gbps routing on PCBs for runs of only a few centimetres, and how easy it is to mess up, I'm shocked that these long cables work at all. That sort of money for this level of tech seems good value to me
seized 3y ago
Considering how easily the charging cables would break and fall apart, I hope they didn't let that team near this one....
- atoav 3y ago
  Strain relieve on cables is a known remedy. Apple just decided they cannot do it in an aesthetically pleasing way. I run the media tech department of a university, so I have more experience than I wanted to ever have with how to treat cables right. Put the spring of an old ball point pen over the end of the cable right where it comes out of the magsafe block. Never wind the cable tightly around other things (e.g. the charger block), cables typically have a minimum bending radius that you should not go below. Do this and the cable will last longer than the computer (freak accidents excluded).
  - seized 3y ago
    I think they were just poorly designed. I'm kind to cables, exactly what you said is what I do. I've had maybe one Google USB-C cable fail on me across many phones and many years, cables in cars, etc. But I had two Lightning cables fail. And I only ever had one iPhone, used only for a year or two, only for work. The OE cables were just junk.
    - mwint 3y ago
      I feel compelled to point out that I had a Nexus too. The USB-C cable lasted fine, possibly because the phone spontaneously bricked itself and the Google zealots told me to put it in the oven.
  - rbanffy 3y ago
    > Do this and the cable will last longer than the computer (freak accidents excluded). All my Apple charger cables lasted longer than any of the Dell computers that sat by their side.
    - atoav 3y ago

27 points by CharlesW 3y ago

[dupe] More discussion earlier over here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37929338 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37929338

CharlesW 3y ago
Related, not a dupe.

jauntywundrkind 3y ago

I'd love to see a comparison that included another active USB4 cable. The original post felt like it picked absolutely awful comparison targets, just totally different classes of devices. The other cables had nowhere near similar capabilities. But there's plenty of sub $50 reasonably well known brands that have active USB4/tb4 cables that they could have compared against that would have been actually interesting to see.

lsllc 3y ago

Wow, that's some incredible imaging. iFixit should get one of those CT scanners for disassembly-free teardown.

mensetmanusman 3y ago

In which profession does this cable add $130 of value in time saved?

jdlshore 3y ago
A profession that needs a cable longer than 1 meter with full bandwidth and power. (This one is 3 meters.) Active cables are much more complicated and expensive than passive cables, and full bandwidth, full power cables even more so.
mwint 3y ago
If you’re serious - any profession in which you’re paid $x/hr, and a cheap knockoff cable could fail and burn 130/x hours of time. Extra worth it because Murphy’s law will make it fail at the worst possible moment. Or more likely, your cheap knockoff cable works well enough except when Joe from accounting is warming his Chef Boyardee in the microwave across the building. That kind of intermittent heisenbug can stealthily burn dozens of valuable hours and not show up on any accounting line.
- lloeki 3y ago
  I recently bought a 5 bay 10Gbps USB-C hard disk enclosure. Most of the reviews were very good, a few mentioned that they had slow speeds, weird disconnects, data corruption. Plugged the thing in with two 16TB disks on a Linux machine, and proceeded to test the disks / enclosure to make sure disks were fine before moving any serious data on those - sometimes you get duds or they get damaged during transport - and that the setup was stable and performant enough for my needs. Well, after a few TBs written it looked like one of the two disks was having write timeouts, operations hanged SMART counters were going up like crazy. It really looked like one of the disks had damage from transport. Tried it again just to be sure and now it was the second disk, with the first one being perfectly fine! More tests showed that the failure was fairly random. So, buggy enclosure? Well, out of a link I tried the other cable (USB-C <-> USB-A) that came with the enclosure. That was slower, but writing was all fine. Tried the original C-C and errors came up again. I had other C-C cables around of various but not spectacular quality, all of them were showing various issues, some even failing right on USB enumeration. Ultimately I decided to not cheap out and find a good cable, and I had an Apple TB3 cable - which does support USB 3.2 2x2 - for some reason that I didn't try as I wanted to keep it for something else. It's been rock solid and plenty fast. My guess is that root cause was interference with other cables unable to cope at higher speeds.
rbanffy 3y ago
If, for instance, you work with very large files on a desktop storage array (music or video editing, VFX, etc), it's easy to assume the $5 cable would be limiting your transfer rates. In that case, buying a $130 cable might be the same as upgrading your disk array.
obenn 3y ago
One example would be anybody who deals with lots of data transfer, like video editing. Accelerating that with a better cable can really add up.
- eqvinox 3y ago
  The cable can't accelerate data transfers. Either it works, or it doesn't¹. If it works, it works at full speed. The bit specific to this Apple cable is that it does TB4 at 3m. That's not possible without active electronics to regenerate the signal in the cable; the maximum length for a passive cable is 2m. Passive 2m cables can be had for about $30 (noname) to $70 (non-Apple quality brand). Fun fact: if you integrate optical transceivers, the cable can essentially be arbitrary length. (Though at some point you run into problems due to neither hardware nor software being built to work with the built-up latency.) [¹ - for the sake of completeness, yes, these cables can partially fail with either sporadic bit errors or breaking one of the lanes. Both of these failure modes are extremely rare.]
neom 3y ago
Shooting tethered in film or photography maybe? (although 3m isn't really long enough for tethered work) https://www.hasselblad.com/h-system/h6d-400c-multi-shot/ https://www.hasselblad.com/h-system/h6d-400c-multi-shot/ (I believe the files are about 2.5gigs a pop) https://www.red.com/v-raptor-xl-black?quantity=1&vxlpackage=3 https://www.red.com/v-raptor-xl-black?quantity=1&vxlpackage=...
javchz 3y ago
I think Media Production and corporate docks are nice candidate. Displayport indocks are awesome.
climb_stealth 3y ago
I can see myself buying something like that. Just to have the assurance of getting a genuine and decent cable. Because third party cabling is a shitshow. And it's the kind of thing I would buy once and then it lives with the computer and screen setup that stays unchanged for years.
atoav 3y ago
As we go into higher frequency (=speed) territory with our cables we will have more expensive cables and it will become harder to build and test them. A decent 4k hdmi cable tester costs 10k€ Whether the pricetag is worth the speed depends entirely on your use case. If you are offloading on a film set where each non-productive hour costs you multiple thousand euros, getting a cable that can do it faster can become economic pretty fast.

asicsarecool 3y ago

The amount of time and care it takes me to design 10gbps routing on PCBs for runs of only a few centimetres, and how easy it is to mess up, I'm shocked that these long cables work at all. That sort of money for this level of tech seems good value to me

seized 3y ago

Considering how easily the charging cables would break and fall apart, I hope they didn't let that team near this one....

atoav 3y ago
Strain relieve on cables is a known remedy. Apple just decided they cannot do it in an aesthetically pleasing way. I run the media tech department of a university, so I have more experience than I wanted to ever have with how to treat cables right. Put the spring of an old ball point pen over the end of the cable right where it comes out of the magsafe block. Never wind the cable tightly around other things (e.g. the charger block), cables typically have a minimum bending radius that you should not go below. Do this and the cable will last longer than the computer (freak accidents excluded).
- seized 3y ago
  I think they were just poorly designed. I'm kind to cables, exactly what you said is what I do. I've had maybe one Google USB-C cable fail on me across many phones and many years, cables in cars, etc. But I had two Lightning cables fail. And I only ever had one iPhone, used only for a year or two, only for work. The OE cables were just junk.
  - mwint 3y ago
    I feel compelled to point out that I had a Nexus too. The USB-C cable lasted fine, possibly because the phone spontaneously bricked itself and the Google zealots told me to put it in the oven.
- rbanffy 3y ago
  > Do this and the cable will last longer than the computer (freak accidents excluded). All my Apple charger cables lasted longer than any of the Dell computers that sat by their side.
  - atoav 3y ago