Apple’s $130 Thunderbolt 4 may be worth the price, CT scan shows – Ars Technica

When Apple finally switched to USB-C, it did so in the spirit of Apple. This submission includes Thunderbolt 4 (USB-C) Pro-Kabel, $130If you need the full 3 meters, one costs $160. Can a single cable, an object whose job is to transmit power and data without anyone noticing, be worth so much money?

Lumafield, a manufacturing-based industrial CT scanner manufacturer, He examines this question in three dimensions. After scanning the best Apple cables, a Amazon Essentials model $10And with USB-C cables priced at $5.59 and $3.89, Lumafield had no concrete answers other than “we buy cables that fit our needs” and “there’s a lot of room for smart engineering within a seemingly fixed specification.” And efficient Production”. Like USB-C.

But we can say: What if your goal is to buy a cable that will stand up to abuse, work with today’s power and data speeds, and work reasonably well into tomorrow, and cross cables off the list of things that might be a problem? Lumafield images show why Apple’s Alpha cable might be worth it.

24 pegs, 9-layer board, stainless steel

die Industrial Neptune X-ray CT Machine It’s 6 feet wide and costs $75,000 per year on a standard contract with advanced imaging and diagnostic software and support. With Apple’s Thunderbolt 4 Pro USB-C cable inside, the Neptune could literally see what was inside. You can see it Web version of LumaFields Voyager.

From the radiation and CT you can see that the Apple cable has 24 pins, each of which is mounted separately on the PCB assembly. These pins run through the “forest of blind and buried paths” or communication lines, which run between components, both between inner layers (blind) and sometimes completely between them (buried). To reliably achieve the rated data transfer rate of 40 Gbit/s, extreme caution is required. Parallel lines extending from a line around a curve are positioned as “oscillations” and compensate for distance for tracking in the inside lane.

It is completely encased in hard plastic and sits on a stainless steel shield that fully bonds to the connector and is made from one piece that grips the connector to the connector in eight directions. In Lomafield’s words, “an amazing piece of precision engineering.”

Non-professional wiring

Supporting Thunderbolt 4, USB 4, 40 Gbps, and 100 watts of power, Apple’s cable is rated higher than most other USB-C cables you can buy. However, you may be wondering how different a budget, low-rated cable can be. Turns out it’s quite different, though sometimes not in the price/design order you might expect.

look at me AmazonBasics-KabelRated at 60 watts and 480 Mbps data, there were half as many pins, and eight of those 12 pins were omitted rather than routed to the PCBA at once. Has metal shielding, less aggressive strain relief and a fully grounded housing. It has the necessary parts to classify it.

Then there are cables that cost less than $10 and look like this. A $5 cable—discontinued now at Amazon—has no shielding, a bare, unreinforced structure, a rubber strain relief, and its pins run directly into the wire, with no shims. It doesn’t seem to be able to deliver the advertised speeds. A roughly $4 cable has this and a full 24 pins for a potentially more powerful connection, although some are used only for power connections.

You can use an in-browser program to get a full X/Y/Z and 3D rotation view of each wire Lomafield location. A $130 cable may not seem worth it to you, but the inside of an expensive cable is sometimes full of more than just hot air.

Entry photo by Lumafield