Originally published at: USB‑C cables x-rayed | Boing Boing
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With so much hidden circuitry (viz. upper posted image) how long before a ‘cheap’ cable is discovered not to be a threat of fire, but of uploading everything passing through it to some nefarious distant site? (and/or what’s the current smallest raspberry pi model?)
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You can’t encabulate assymetrically! Nobody will ever figure out how to redondify the plastisimetrics necessary for that to work. Mark my words.
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So the Apple USB-C cable is incredibly sophisticated and well made, but at $130 it probably still commands a lavish surcharge for the Apple logo. Who sells the white-label version of the Apple USB-C cable for $39?
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owc has a thunderbolt 4 cable for $57. Note that “Thunderbolt 4” is a the operative term. It only looks like USB-C. You wouldn’t want to connect your drive array at 480 Mb/s, which is technically within spec, though sneaky.
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That little Apple Thunderbolt PC board is ten layers! The technology in cables these days is mind-blowing. Also the data rates are mind-blowing. A 40 Gbit/sec Ethernet cable costs a bit more and its plugs are 5x bigger. And it doesn’t do any power transfer. When you look at it that way, the Apple cable is a bargain.
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right, and 100W charging? That’s a lot.
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You mean these? They’ve been available in various forms for years.
The origin for these was the leak of the so-called NSA ANT Catalog when Michael Ossmann saw it and said “Hey, I could make these NSA spy devices with off-the-shelf parts!” Thus was born the NSA Playset, which is a catalog of open source versions of the secret NSA spy tools.
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jinx!
1234567890 you owe me a coke!
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They have not been shrinking the minimum size since they did the RPi Zero. So approximately the size of a memory DIMM. The "full size (smaller then a paperback) version has been getting much much faster while sort of holding the lid down on the price (they added some variants with more RAM that cost more dollars, although tens of more dollars not $100s, so still a great deal; and the RPi 4 and RPi 5 have much faster I/O (the 4 added high speed USB, and 5 added I think a serial PCI…and maybe M.2 storage connectors or something that gets you past the SD requirement).
However the outgoing Lightining standard Apple had some cables like the lightning to HDMI that had an ARM Cortex M0+ that booted a stripped down Unix variant and runs an application that reads data from the lightning side and decodes MPEG or some other lossless motion encoded video. So while you can’t fit an RPi in a cable, you can get a whole CPU in there. The CPUs Apple use actually boot an image the phone provides them, I don’t remember if that was because they coulndn’t fit a big enough ROM in there or not, but I expect you can fit a masked ROM in very very little space. Apple was either looking to save money or they wanted to be able to fix bugs later.
I don’t know if they have done that with any non-Lighting cables. The USB-C HDMI cable very likely doesn’t need that, I think USB-C has an “alternative mode” to run HDMI over some of the pins (I know DVI does), and expect that is a lot easier to use then booting a whole other system and doing real time video compression…
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What’s the best USB-C cable, if you’re not on the Apple train?
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Depends on what you need it for. Is it for just charging? Are you needing it for heavy data transfers? Or are you needing a good quality daily use cable that can be used for everything?
Wirecutter does have recs for different use types, i’m sure other sites have their own excellent picks but you can start with their recommendations first
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Don’t make the mistake I made when USBC first came out. I bought cables with an eye towards futureproofing and maximizing both data and charging capacity. I ended up with stiff heavy expensive cables that are too difficult to wrangle for most handheld devices, because the stiffness tends to pull the connector out as you handle the device.
Better to determine your current data and charging needs, and buy the thin cable that meets them. Spend your money on brands that are reliable instead of futureproofing.
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Bah, you youngsters with your Assymetricity. This was good enough for me, still is!:
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