They don't need to limit themselves to HDMI power. They could do like the Chromecast and Fire stick do, and have an external power source for 7.5W or whatever over USB. At that power level, I'm sure Apple could develop or repurpose their existing silicon lineup to be able to make a passively cooled stick design for under $100.

This meant on traditional forums everyone's position was not only presented equally

No, the earlier web forums based on phpbb or vbulletin or whatever prioritized the most recent posts. That means that plenty of good content was drowned out by fast moving threads, and threads were sorted by most recent activity, which would allow some threads to fall off quickly unless "bumped."

It was inherently limited in scale. The votes made such a difference for the forums that implemented it (slashdot, hacker news, eventually reddit) that it could make the more popular stuff more visible, rather than the most recent stuff more visible. And whatever the local site culture was could prioritize the characteristics that were popular in that particular place. That's why tech support almost entirely switched to reddit or similar places, because the helpfulness of a comment was generally what drove its popularity.

And the biggest problem with the older forums was that they didn't allow for threading. Any particular comment can spawn its own discussion without taking the rest of the thread off on that tangent.

This limitation comes up sometimes when people try to build out a zero-trust cable where they can get a charge but not necessarily transfer data to or from an untrusted device on the other side.

Well, the last two monitors I bought didn't come with any signal cables at all, probably because the manufacturers don't need to presume whether the consumer prefers HDMI or DP, or whether the other side is full size, mini-DP/mini-HDMI, or USB-C alt mode. Just right there, that's 5 possibilities, each about as common as the others.

You can even get PD capable USB-C cables that don’t transmit data at all.

I don't think this is right. The PD standard requires the negotiation of which side is the source and which is the sink, and the voltage/amperage, over those data links. So it has to at least support the bare minimum data transmission in order for PD to work.

Apple doesn't manufacture docks. It's entirely third party manufacturers (and some people freely use Dell-branded docks with their Apple laptops).

Adapting from usb- a to b is not adapting anything other than the physical connector.

Neither is the DisplayPort cables I'm talking about, where one end is just USB-C, but the signal actually transmitted through the USB-C connector and the cable itself is the HBR/UHBR transmission mode of any other DisplayPort cable (whatever the combination of the two ends physical connectors, between full DisplayPort, mini DisplayPort, or USB-C). It's not "adapted" because the data signals aren't converted in any way.

So it's as much an "adapter" as a DP cable that is a mini one one side and a full size on the other.

Precisely, you need to use an adapter

No, it's not an adapter. It's literally just a cable with two different ends.

Unless you consider an ordinary USB-A to USB-B (or mini B or micro B) to be an "adapter," too.

Dual 4k120 would already saturate the bandwith.

What would you use to drive dual 4k/120 displays over a single cable, if not Thunderbolt over USB-C? And what 2017 laptops were capable of doing that?

Even if we're talking about two different cables over two different ports, that's still a pretty unusual use case that not a lot of laptops would've been capable of in 2017.

Well, Bell Labs isn't the magical place that it used to be, and that was originally an R&D shop basically enabled by the economics of the AT&T monopoly.

Mini DVI: long dead. Replaced with HDMI. The MacBook pro’s have HDMI

HDMI has always been inferior to DisplayPort, for computer displays. I'd personally consider DP to be the natural successor to DVI.

I have one of the more recent models. When I sit down at my desk, I just plug it into a Thunderbolt dock anyway, through a single port. All those extra ports just sit unused, despite having a USB-A keyboard and mouse, Ethernet jack, and 4k monitor at that desk. Plus the dongle provides power to the laptop.

I do use the SD reader from time to time, though. I used to have an external reader that was a bit unwieldy on the laptop, but it was also a requirement from when I was shooting pictures on a CompactFlash, which has never had a built in reader on any laptop.

Can you break this down?

The 2017 model pictured in this post supported Thunderbolt 3, which was a 40 gbps connection. Supported display modes included up to 4k@120, 2x4k@60, or 5k@60, which was better than the then-standard HDMI 2.0.

What combination of resolution, frame rate, and color depth are you envisioning that having a dock handle a gigabit Ethernet connection, analog audio would require scaling down the display resolution through the same port?

By 2021, the MacBook Pros were supporting TB4, and the spec sheets on third party docking stations were supporting 8k resolutions, even if Macs themselves only supported 6k, or up to 4x4k.

Even if we talk about DisplayPort Alt Mode, a VESA standard developed in 2014, and supported in the 2017 models pictured in this post, that's just a standard DP connection, which in 2017 supported HDR 5k@60. But didn't support a whole separate dock with networking and USB ports.

The Apples of this generation pictured all support DisplayPort alt mode, and Thunderbolt 3, through those USB-C ports. That means that you could use passive USB-C to DP cables that didn't need active translation in the cable/adapter itself.

Even some of Intel's Arrow Lake/Lunar Lake chips are being fabbed at TSMC.

The vast majority of what YouTube does on a technical level is ingesting a ton of uploaded user video, encoding it in dozens of combinations of resolution, framerate, quality, and codec, then seamlessly choosing which version to serve to requesting clients to balance bandwidth, perceived quality, power efficiency in the data center, power efficiency on client devices, and hardware support for the client. There's a lot of stuff going on behind the scenes, and there's a reason why the user experience is much more seamless on YouTube on a shitty data connection than, say, Plex on a good data connection.

No, it doesn't need to be realtime, but people with metered or throttled bandwidth might benefit from downloading just in time video at optimized settings.

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A big part of it is that Apple literally places the memory on the same package. It's literally inside the black package that has the CPU, GPU, and some other dedicated processing units. This system-in-a-package configuration allows the M series chips to have memory bandwidth that basically no other system can match.

Intel tried to put memory on package, but has announced that it won't be doing that anymore, probably because it's so expensive to do so.

The hyphen can provide indicators on how to parse the letters on either side. "Pen-Island" would be pronounced differently from "Penisland."

For the news articles themselves, each of the major companies is using a major CMS system, many of them developed in house or licensed from another major media organization.

But for things like journalist microblogging, Mastodon seems like a stand-in replacement for Twitter or Threads or Bluesky, that could theoretically integrate with their existing authentication/identity/account management system that they use to provide logins, email, intranet access, publishing rights on whatever CMS they do have, etc.

Same with universities. Sure, each department might have official webpages, but why not provide faculty and students with the ability to engage on a university-hosted service like Mastodon or Lemmy?

Governments (federal, state, local) could do the same thing with official communications.

It could be like the old days of email, where people got their public facing addresses from their employer or university, and then were able to use that address relatively freely, including for personal use in many instances. In a sense, the domain/instance could show your association with that domain owner (a university or government or newspaper or company), but you were still speaking as yourself when using that service.