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.
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.
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.