Once TSMC Arizona is up and running (probably 2027 or so), that's going to be a supply chain that goes through entirely friendly countries, not at significant geopolitical risk.
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Ok, thanks for talking me through this. I have completely unused HDMI ports on my laptops and I'm genuinely curious about those who are using theirs.
display - USB-C at work, HDMI (through USB-C dock) at home
Obviously you can't use an HDMI port that you don't have, but I gotta ask: if you had one of the newer MBPs with built-in HDMI, would you be using that HDMI port? Because it sounds like you wouldn't, and that you'd still rely on the USB-C dock to do everything.
And that's been my position this whole thread. I think that the MBP's return of the HDMI port was greeted with lots of fanfare, but I don't actually know anyone who switched back to HDMI.
Yeah, I’m not going to throw out perfectly good hardware just to unify cables somewhat.
I was referring to the replacement of HDMI 2.0 stuff with 2.1 stuff - not seeing an advantage to choosing HDMI 2.1 over Thunderbolt. And then there's the support hell of intermingled HDMI 2.0 and 2.1 stuff, including cables and ports and dongles and adapters.
Either way, I'm still stuck on the idea of direct HDMI use as being so ubiquitous that it warrants being built into a non-gaming laptop that already has Thunderbolt and DP (and USB-PD) support through the preexisting USB-C ports.
Thunderbolt only works for workstations if the monitor supports it
Even if driving multiple monitors over HDMI or DVI or DP or VGA or whatever, the dock that actually connects directly to the laptop is best served with Thunderbolt over USB-C, since we'd expect the monitors and docking station (and power cords and an external keyboard/mouse and maybe even ethernet) to all remain stationary. That particular link in the chain is better served as a single Thunderbolt connection, rather than hooking up multiple cables representing display signal data, other signal data, and power. And this tech is older than HDMI 2.1!
So I'm not seeing that type of HDMI use as a significant percentage of users, enough to justify including on literally every 14" or 16" Macbook Pro with their integrated GPUs. At least not in workplaces.
You use HDMI for all those use cases? Seems like Thunderbolt is a much better dock for workstations, and DisplayPort is generally better for computer monitors and the resolution/refresh rates useful for that kind of work. The broad support of cables and HDMI displays is for HDMI 2.0, which caps at 4k60. By the time HDMI 2.1 hit the market, Thunderbolt and DisplayPort Alt mode had been out for a few years, so it would've made more sense to just upgrade to Thunderbolt rather than getting an all new HDMI lineup.
To a second screen, sure. But I'm saying that DisplayPort and Thunderbolt are so much better, are generally supported by more computer monitors (but probably fewer TVs). I'd be surprised that there are a lot of people using HDMI in particular.
Now, I don't know if it's in USBC cables
It's not. Apple specifically follows the USB-PD standard, and went a long way in getting all the other competing standards (Qualcomm's Quick Charge, Samsung Adaptive Fast Charge) to become compatible with USB-PD. Now, pretty much every USB-C to USB-C cable supports USB-PD.
Also a shout out to Google Engineer Benson Leung who went on a spree of testing cables and wall adapters for compliance with standards after a charger set his tablet on fire. The work he did between 2016-2018 went a long way in getting bad cables taken off the market.
Are people connecting their laptops to TVs frequently enough that this should be built into every single unit shipped? I can't imagine the percentage of users who actually use their HDMI ports is very high.
HDMI is a dogshit standard and everyone should've moved over to DisplayPort or Thunderbolt over the USB-C form factor.
Do you mean Lisa Frank, the artist for colorful animals on school supplies, and not Anne Frank, the famous diarist who was killed by the Nazis during the Holocaust?
The problem is that there are too many separate dimensions to define the tiers.
In terms of data signaling speed and latency, you have the basic generations of USB 1.x, 2.0, 3.x, and 4, with Thunderbolt 3 essentially being the same thing as USB4, and Thunderbolt 4 adding on some more minimum requirements.
On top of that, you have USB-PD, which is its own standard for power delivery, including how the devices conduct handshakes over a certified cable.
And then you have the standards for not just raw data speed, but also what other modes are supported, for information to be seamlessly tunneled through the cable and connection in a mode that carries signals other than the data signal spec for USB. Most famously, there's the DisplayPort Alt Mode for driving display data over a USB-C connection with a DP-compatible monitor. But there's also an analog audio mode so that the cable and port passes along analog data to or from microphones or speakers.
Each type of cable, too, carries different physical requirements, which also causes a challenge on how long the cable can be and still work properly. That's why a lot of the cables that support the latest and greatest data and power standards tend to be short. A longer cable might be useful, but could come at the sacrifice of not supporting certain types of functions. I personally have a long cable that supports USB-PD but can't carry thunderbolt data speeds or certain types of signals, but I like it because it's good for plugging in a charger when I'm not that close to an outlet. But I also know it's not a good cable for connecting my external SSD, which would be bottlenecked at USB 2.0 speeds.
So the tiers themselves aren't going to be well defined.
The only devices that don't have at least Thunderbolt 3 on all ports do use the Thunderbolt logo on the ones that support it, except the short-lived 12-inch MacBook (non-Pro, non-Air). Basically, for data transfer:
- If it's a 12-inch MacBook, the single USB-C port doesn't support Thunderbolt, and only supports USB 3.1 Gen 1.
- In all other devices, if the ports are unmarked, they all support Thunderbolt 3 or higher
- If the ports are marked with Thunderbolt symbols, those ports support Thunderbolt but the unmarked ports on the same computer don't.
For power delivery, every USB-C port in every Apple laptop supports at least first generation USB-PD.
For display, every USB-C port in every Apple laptop (and maybe even the desktops) supports DisplayPort alt mode.
It's annoying but not actually that hard to remember in the wild.
Everything defined in the Thunderbolt 3 spec was incorporated into the USB 4 spec, so Thunderbolt 3 and USB 4 should be basically identical. In reality the two standards are enforced by different certification bodies, so some hardware manufacturers can't really market their compliance with one or the other standard until they get that certification. Framework's laptops dealt with that for a while, where they represented that their ports supported certain specs that were basically identical to the USB 4 spec or even the Thunderbolt 4 spec, but couldn't say so until after units had already been shipping.
This isn't exactly what you asked, but our URI/URL schema is basically a bunch of missed opportunities, and I wish it was better designed.
Ok so it starts off with the scheme name, which makes sense. http: or ftp: or even tel:
But then it goes into the domain name system, which suffers from the problem that the root, then top level domain, then domain, then progressively smaller subdomains, go right to left. www.example.com requires the system look up the root domain, to see who manages the .com tld, then who owns example.com, then a lookup of the www subdomain. Then, if there needs to be a port number specified, that goes after the domain name, right next to the implied root domain. Then the rest of the URL, by default, goes left to right in decreasing order of significance. It's just a weird mismatch, and would make a ton more sense if it were all left to right, including the domain name.
Then don't get me started about how the www subdomain itself no longer makes sense. I get that the system was designed long before HTTP and the WWW took over the internet as basically the default, but if we had known that in advance it would've made sense to not try to push www in front of all website domains throughout the 90"s and early 2000's.
Functionally speaking, I don't see this as a significant issue.
JPEG quality settings can run a pretty wide gamut, and obviously wouldn't be immediately apparent without viewing the file and analyzing the metadata. But if we're looking at metadata, JPEG XL reports that stuff, too.
Of course, the metadata might only report the most recent conversion, but that's still a problem with all image formats, where conversion between GIF/PNG/JPG, or even edits to JPGs, would likely create lots of artifacts even if the last step happens to be lossless.
You're right that we should ensure that the metadata does accurately describe whether an image has ever been encoded in a lossy manner, though. It's especially important for things like medical scans where every pixel matters, and needs to be trusted as coming from the sensor rather than an artifact of the encoding process, to eliminate some types of error. That's why I'm hopeful that a full JXL based workflow for those images will preserve the details when necessary, and give fewer opportunities for that type of silent/unknown loss of data to occur.
- Existing JPEG files (which are the vast, vast majority of images currently on the web and in people's own libraries/catalogs) can be losslessly compressed even further with zero loss of quality. This alone means that there's benefits to adoption, if nothing else for archival and serving old stuff.
- JPEG XL encoding and decoding is much, much faster than pretty much any other format.
- The format works for both lossy and lossless compression, depending on the use case and need. Photographs can be encoded in a lossy way much more efficiently than JPEG and things like screenshots can be losslessly encoded more efficiently than PNG.
- The format anticipates being useful for both screen and prints. Webp, HEIF, and AVIF are all optimized for screen resolutions, and fail at truly high resolution uses appropriate for prints. The JPEG XL format isn't ready to replace camera RAW files, but there's room in the spec to accommodate that use case, too.
It's great and should be adopted everywhere, to replace every raster format from JPEG photographs to animated GIFs (or the more modern live photos format with full color depth in moving pictures) to PNGs to scanned TIFFs with zero compression/loss.
Adobe is backing the format, Apple support is coming along, and there are rumors that Apple is switching from HEIC to JPEG XL as a capture format as early as the iPhone 16 coming out in a few weeks. As soon as we have a full blown workflow that can take images from camera to post processing to publishing in JXL, we might see a pretty strong push for adoption at the user side (browsers, websites, chat programs, social media apps and sites, etc.).
They always win, unless they don't. History is littered with examples of the freer standard losing to the more proprietary standard, with plenty of examples going the other way, too.
Openness is an advantage in some cases, but tight control can be an advantage in some other cases.
Stingrays don't do shit for this. That's mostly real time location data focused in by tricking your phone into reporting its location to a fake cell tower controlled by an adversary. That doesn't get into the data in your phone, and even if someone used the fake tower to man in the middle, by default pretty much all of a phone's Internet traffic is encrypted from the ISP.
The world of breaking disk encryption on devices is a completely different line of technology, tools, and techniques.
Mine's getting pretty thicc