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.

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.

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.

Sometimes the identity of the messenger is important.

Twitter was super easy to set up with the API to periodically tweet the output of some automated script: a weather forecast, a public safety alert, an air quality alert, a traffic advisory, a sports score, a news headline, etc.

These are the types of messages that you’d want to subscribe to the actual identity, and maybe even be able to forward to others (aka retweeting) without compromising the identity verification inherent in the system.

Twitter was an important service, and that’s why there are so many contenders trying to replace at least part of the experience.

Semiconductor manufacturing has gotten better over time, with exponential improvement to transistor density, which translates pretty directly to performance. This observation traces back to the 60’s and is commonly known as Moore’s Law.

Fitting more transistors into the same size space required quite a few technical advancements and paradigm shifts. But for the first few decades of Moore’s law, every time they started to approach some kind of physical limit, they’d develop a completely new technique to get things smaller: photolithography moved from off the shelf chemicals purchased from photography companies like Eastman Kodak to specialized manufacturing processes, while the light used went higher and higher wavelength, with the use of new technology like lasers to get even more precisely etched masks.

Most recently, the main areas of physical improvement has been in using extreme ultraviolet (aka EUV) wavelengths to get really small features, and certain three dimensional structures that break out from the old paradigm of stacking a bunch of planar materials on each other. Each of these breakthroughs was 20 years in the making, so the R&D and the implementation details had to be hammered out with partners in a tightly orchestrated process, to see if it would even work at scale.

Some manufacturers recognized the huge cost and the uncertainty of success in taking stuff from academic papers in the 2000s and actually mass producing chips in 2025, so they abandoned the leading edge. Global Foundries, Micron, and a bunch of others basically decided it wasn’t worth the investment to try to compete, and now manufacture in those older nodes, without necessarily trying to compete on the newest nodes, leaving things to Intel, Samsung, and TSMC.

TSMC managed to get EUV working at scale before Intel did. And even though Intel beat TSMC to market with certain three dimensional structures known as “FinFETs,” the next 2 generations after that, TSMC managed to really shove them in there at higher density, by using combining those FinFETs with lithography techniques that Intel couldn’t figure out fast enough. And every time Intel seemed to get close, a new engineering challenge would stifle them. And after a few years of stagnation, they went from being consistently 3 years ahead of TSMC to seeming like they’re about 2 years behind TSMC.

On the design side of things, AMD pioneered chiplet-based design, where different pieces of silicon could be packaged together, which allowed them to have higher yields (an error in a big slab of silicon might make the whole thing worthless) and to mix and match things in a more modular way. Intel was slow to adopt that, so AMD started taking the lead in CPU performance per watt.

It’s difficult engineering challenges, traceable back to decisions made in the past decades. Not all of the decisions were obviously wrong at the time, but nobody could’ve predicted at the time that TSMC and AMD would be able to leapfrog Intel based on these specific engineering challenges.

Intel has a few things on the roadmap that might allow it to leapfrog the competition again (especially if the competition runs into their own setbacks). Intel is ramping up use of EUV in its current processes, are ramping up a competing three dimensional structures they call RibbonFET to compete with TSMC’s Gate All Around (both of which are supposed to replace FinFETs) and they’re hoping to beat TSMC to backside power delivery, which is going to represent a significant paradigm shift in how chips are designed.

It’s true that in business, success begets success, but it’s also true that each new generation presents its own novel challenges, and it’s not easy to see where any given competitor might get stuck. Semiconductor manufacturing is basically wizardry, and the history of the industry shows that today’s leaders might get left behind, really quickly.