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.

From my frame of reference they designed the phones to be backwards compatible with preexisting accessories.

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?

Yeah, this advanced packaging stuff is pretty new, where they figured out how to make little chiplets but still put them onto the same package, connected by new tech that finally allows for high speed, low latency connections between chiplets (without causing dealbreaker temperature issues). That’s opened up a lot of progress even as improving the circuits on the silicon itself has run into engineering challenges.

So while TSMC seemingly ahead of its competition on actually printing circuits on silicon with smaller and denser features, advanced packaging tech is going a long way in allowing companies to mix and match different pieces of silicon with different strengths and functionality (for a more cost effective end solution, and making better use of the nodes that aren’t at the absolute bleeding edge).

Engineers are doing all sorts of cool stuff right now.

You’re right, it’s not the same die, but the advanced packaging techniques that they keep improving (like the vertical stacking you mention) make for a much tighter set of specs for the raw flash storage silicon compared to what they might be putting in USB drives or NVMe sticks, in power consumption/temperature management, bus speeds/latency, form factor, etc.

So it’d be more accurate to describe it as a system on a package (SiP) rather than a system on a chip (SoC). Either way, that carries certain requirements that aren’t present for a standalone storage package separately soldered onto the PCB, or even storage through some kind of non-soldered swappable interface.

Packaging flash storage onto the actual SoC SiP costs more than manufacturing the same amount of storage into an M.2 or external USB form factor, so that price can’t be directly compared. They’re making a big chunk of profit on storage upgrades, and on cloud subscriptions, but it’s not exactly cheap to give everyone 1TB of storage at that base price.

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.

Ok so most monitors sold today support DDC/CI controls for at least brightness, and some support controlling color profiles over the DDC/CI interface.

If you get some kind of external ambient light sensor and plug it into a USB port, you might be able to configure a script that controls the brightness of the monitor based on ambient light, without buying a new monitor.

They chiplet past 500

I don’t know if I’m using the right vocabulary, maybe “die size” is the wrong way to describe it. But the Ultra line packages two Max SoCs with a high performance interconnect, so that the whole package does use about 1000 mm^2 of silicon.

My broader point is that much of Apple’s performance comes from their willingness to actually use a lot of silicon area to achieve that performance, and it’s very expensive to do so.

Apple does two things that are very expensive:

1. They use a huge physical area of silicon for their high performance chips. The “Pro” line of M chips have a die size of around 280 square mm, the “Max” line is about 500 square mm, and the “Ultra” line is possibly more than 1000 square mm. This is incredibly expensive to manufacture and package.
2. They pay top dollar to get the exclusive rights to TSMC’s new nodes. They lock up the first year or so of TSMC’s manufacturing capacity at any given node, at which point there is enough capacity to accommodate other designs from other TSMC clients (AMD, NVIDIA, Qualcomm, etc.). That means you can just go out and buy an Apple device made from TSMC’s latest node before AMD or Qualcomm have even announced the lines that will be using those nodes.

Those are business decisions that others simply can’t afford to follow.

The biggest problem they are having is platform maturity

Maybe that’s an explanation for desktop/laptop performance, but I look at the mobile SoC space where Apple holds a commanding lead over ARM chips from Qualcomm, and where Qualcomm has better performance and efficiency than Samsung’s Exynos line, and I’m thinking a huge chunk of the difference between manufacturers can’t simply be explained by ISA or platform maturity. Apple has clearly been prioritizing battery life and efficiency for 10+ generations of Apple Silicon in the mobile market, and has a lead independent of its ISA, even as it trickled over to the laptop and desktop market.

Well, specifically, they’re promising battery life that beats Qualcomm’s implementation of an ARM laptop SoC.

Qualcomm is significantly behind Apple. I’m not convinced that the ISA matters all that much for battery life. AMD’s x86_64 performance per watt blew Intel’s out of the water in recent generations, and Qualcomm/Samsung’s ARM chips can’t compete with Apple’s ARM chips in the mobile, tablet, or laptop space.

To be honest, no. I mainly know about JPEG XL only because I’m acutely aware of the limitations of standard JPEG for both photography and high resolution scanned documents, where noise and real world messiness cause all sorts of problems. Something like QOI seems ideal for synthetic images, which I don’t work with a lot, and wouldn’t know the limitations of PNG as well.