USB-C head-to-head teardown - Lumafield
The reign of the Lightning cable is over, and the USB-C era has begun — leaving us wondering what sets one charger apart from another. We do a teardown of Apple's Thunderbolt 4 and its competitors.
cross-posted from: https://lemdro.id/post/2469210 (!android@lemdro.id)
So they figured out that a $130 Thunderbolt 4 100W E-marker cable is better designed than a $10 USB 2 60W cable? I think they should have looked at a cheaper high-end cable, like a 240W Thunderbolt 4 cable, to see how a comparable one compares.
This was my gripe with the write up as well. Like everybody, I’m interested in the least expensive option with similar features to the $130 option. Surely there’s something in the $20-30 range they could’ve studied?
This is basically an ad for CT machines, not anything scientific.
This article starts off talking about iPhones and USB C, then proceeds to scan a Thunderbolt cable. The iPhone 15 pro tops out at USB 3, not Thunderbolt.
The connector is not the cable. They should be comparing expensive thunderbolt cables to cheap thunderbolt cables, or expensive USB 3 cables to cheap USB 3 cables.
Interesting find that the cheapest cable is actually not the worst. Too bad the USB-C spec allows such a mess of speeds and charging standards.
I wouldn’t mind the various levels of there were a simple, consistent marking standard for speed and power rating.
They do have standard icons for them, but it’s not required to use them. Companies like Apple are a problem case there since they value a clean look over information, random Chinese brands sometimes use them.
That is part of it, but I kind of feel like PCs and phones need better reporting to the user, if adequate data is accessible to the host.
If I'm being bottlenecked in thoughput by speed or in power by the PD capabilities of a cable, I'd like the host to tell me if it can figure that out.
There are like 5 speed and 5 power levels. The only alternative is all cables are stupidly short and expensive.
As of USB-PD 3.1 there are now nine fixed voltages - 5, 9, 12, 15, 20, 28, 36, and 48V - and two variable-voltage modes; PPS with 3.3 - 21V in 0.02V increments, and AVS with 15 - 48V in 0.1V increments.
Combined with a few different current limits, some of these features being optional, and then doubling down with what your cable does or doesn't support, amazing anything gets charged at all.
It’s also easy to forget that degradation on the highest spec cables is pretty severe. A 1m full spec thunderbolt 4 cable can be made dirt cheap but there extremely limited 3m cables to the point that $160 is reasonable despite it sounding silly
So I’m ignorant here, but what is the spec difference between the supplied iPhone USB-C cable and the one that comes with the newer MacBooks? I never bothered to look, but I did mark the one that came with my MacBook as I assumed it was higher rated than some other cable (although I still just charge with the MagSafe adapter anyway).
I wish they tested some other high quality but not as expensive cables against apple's instead of the total junk ones. Baseus or something.
I'll give them props for the scans, those are cool. But c'mon, this fanboi is comparing specs of a thunderbolt 4 pro cable to a USB 2 from 1996. Granted, not much changes except speed and capacity but those two things take up a big part of this op-ed.
The whole point, as I get it, is that those fancy cables are proprietary. The tech and circuitry embedded in the TB4 cables should be in the charger, phone, computer, etc. A cable should just be a cable.
That's not really possible. With such a wide-ranging standard as USB-C, the cable needs to report what it can support. Without E-marker chips, for example, there would be three possible results: no cable can charge quickly, every cable is thick, short, and expensive, or cables catch on fire frequently. Cheap cables that don't support all of the extra features are just cables, but the good ones need to let the computer know what they are capable of.
USB-C era has begun a long time ago, Apple fans waking up from their bubble
You do know that Apple was involved in the development of USB-C (about a quarter of the people working on it were from Apple) and was one of the first companies to put USB-C on a laptop (in 2015) ?
They scanned a Thunderbolt cable with a USB C connector. No iPhones have a thunderbolt port. In other words, this is the cable Apple makes to support its Macs. And Apple has had C-only connectors on Macs since 2015.
It's an apples to oranges comparison for sure. The only reason you'd purchase a Thunderbolt cable is to support Thunderbolt enabled hardware, which are designed for Apple computers. It would have been a better comparison if they scanned the typical USB-C cable provided with a laptop or iPad instead. They start at $19.00 per 1 meter cable.
In this thread: people shitting on Apple for not implementing USB C. No one talking about how they make an impressively engineered, although very expensive, cable.
Which is what the article is actually about.
I don't know how impressive it is unless it gets compared to a cable with similar features, of which there are many.. at a fraction of the cost. So it would be excellent to see the same scans on a £30 cable to see just how over engineered the Apple cable may or may not be.
