Well, the last two monitors I bought didn’t come with any signal cables at all, probably because the manufacturers don’t need to presume whether the consumer prefers HDMI or DP, or whether the other side is full size, mini-DP/mini-HDMI, or USB-C alt mode. Just right there, that’s 5 possibilities, each about as common as the others.
You can even get PD capable USB-C cables that don’t transmit data at all.
I don’t think this is right. The PD standard requires the negotiation of which side is the source and which is the sink, and the voltage/amperage, over those data links. So it has to at least support the bare minimum data transmission in order for PD to work.
Apple doesn’t manufacture docks. It’s entirely third party manufacturers (and some people freely use Dell-branded docks with their Apple laptops).
Adapting from usb- a to b is not adapting anything other than the physical connector.
Neither is the DisplayPort cables I’m talking about, where one end is just USB-C, but the signal actually transmitted through the USB-C connector and the cable itself is the HBR/UHBR transmission mode of any other DisplayPort cable (whatever the combination of the two ends physical connectors, between full DisplayPort, mini DisplayPort, or USB-C). It’s not “adapted” because the data signals aren’t converted in any way.
So it’s as much an “adapter” as a DP cable that is a mini one one side and a full size on the other.
Precisely, you need to use an adapter
No, it’s not an adapter. It’s literally just a cable with two different ends.
Unless you consider an ordinary USB-A to USB-B (or mini B or micro B) to be an “adapter,” too.
Dual 4k120 would already saturate the bandwith.
What would you use to drive dual 4k/120 displays over a single cable, if not Thunderbolt over USB-C? And what 2017 laptops were capable of doing that?
Even if we’re talking about two different cables over two different ports, that’s still a pretty unusual use case that not a lot of laptops would’ve been capable of in 2017.
Well, Bell Labs isn’t the magical place that it used to be, and that was originally an R&D shop basically enabled by the economics of the AT&T monopoly.
Mini DVI: long dead. Replaced with HDMI. The MacBook pro’s have HDMI
HDMI has always been inferior to DisplayPort, for computer displays. I’d personally consider DP to be the natural successor to DVI.
I have one of the more recent models. When I sit down at my desk, I just plug it into a Thunderbolt dock anyway, through a single port. All those extra ports just sit unused, despite having a USB-A keyboard and mouse, Ethernet jack, and 4k monitor at that desk. Plus the dongle provides power to the laptop.
I do use the SD reader from time to time, though. I used to have an external reader that was a bit unwieldy on the laptop, but it was also a requirement from when I was shooting pictures on a CompactFlash, which has never had a built in reader on any laptop.
Can you break this down?
The 2017 model pictured in this post supported Thunderbolt 3, which was a 40 gbps connection. Supported display modes included up to 4k@120, 2x4k@60, or 5k@60, which was better than the then-standard HDMI 2.0.
What combination of resolution, frame rate, and color depth are you envisioning that having a dock handle a gigabit Ethernet connection, analog audio would require scaling down the display resolution through the same port?
By 2021, the MacBook Pros were supporting TB4, and the spec sheets on third party docking stations were supporting 8k resolutions, even if Macs themselves only supported 6k, or up to 4x4k.
Even if we talk about DisplayPort Alt Mode, a VESA standard developed in 2014, and supported in the 2017 models pictured in this post, that’s just a standard DP connection, which in 2017 supported HDR 5k@60. But didn’t support a whole separate dock with networking and USB ports.
The Apples of this generation pictured all support DisplayPort alt mode, and Thunderbolt 3, through those USB-C ports. That means that you could use passive USB-C to DP cables that didn’t need active translation in the cable/adapter itself.
Even some of Intel’s Arrow Lake/Lunar Lake chips are being fabbed at TSMC.
This limitation comes up sometimes when people try to build out a zero-trust cable where they can get a charge but not necessarily transfer data to or from an untrusted device on the other side.