And? Apple used to sell a way more expensive than that TB2 cable if high price is your point and besides, saying Apple charges a premium price for a premium product (like this) is about as insightful as saying the sky is blue.
Do you have any of these? The photos show no markings on the cable at all, which is a bummer. If I get some I'll have to put zip tie tags on them to label them, otherwise I'll never remember which ones are the good ones or not.
3m is beyond the max cable length specified by Thunderbolt, so it requires active extenders (they're hidden in the plugs) and tight manufacturing and shielding. You're paying extra for the ability to break that max length spec, and it's one of only a handful of products that do it.
The only other one I'm aware of is the Corning Active Optical Cable series which costs $360 for a 10m Thunderbolt 3 cable or $479 for a 30m cable, or $215 for a 10m Thunderbolt 2 cable (ie slower and different connector, potentially needs a $50 converter on each end). Also those Corning cables have a reputation for failing barely out of warranty even if they are treated very delicately. Amazon reviews are full of "my cable failed 1 year and 1 month after purchase and Corning told me to go eat a dick" type reviews.
Also, just FYI, but max length spec on a USB 4 cable (which will support Thunderbolt-like features) is 0.8m and you'll need to use special cables to get the full capabilities there too, you can't just use a $15 usb-c to usb-c cable you bought off amazon. Just like some usb-c cables only support usb 2.0 speeds, you won't get full-duplex 40gbps signaling out of a 10gbps half-duplex USB 3.1 cable. USB certification isn't magic, these are physics-based electrical/RF problems here and high-capability cables/devices require more expensive implementations.
But anyway go ahead and click through that B+H link and look through their thunderbolt 3 cable category for another 3-meter cable. You won't find any. If 2 meters is not enough... your options are Apple, Corning, or nothing.
The Apple premium is still a thing, but I'd expect competitors to clock in around $100 if/when they come out. There is always a steep price inflection once you move from passive cables to active cables or fiber. If you can avoid that, great, use a shorter cable. If you can't, you have to pay up. Not everyone can just move everything closer (eg running through walls) and it's always so disappointing to see people arguing against consumers having options just because they don't personally need them. No one is making you buy this, but the people who do now have an option they didn't before. That "if I'm not interested in a product then it shouldn't exist at all!" mindset seems to be extremely pervasive in the tech space and I just don't get it, not every product has to be aimed at you personally. It's "center of the universe syndrome" as one of my teachers liked to call it.
I've looked at the Corning cables for setting up a Vive Wireless Adapter that can be in a different room from my desktop rig (adapter goes in a Thunderbolt enclosure, mounted on the wall, thunderbolt optical cable goes through the walls...) but the price and the failures kinda scared me off. I get that this won't work for normies, but personally I'd prefer to have the transceivers and the fiber be separate so I can replace one or the other if needed. Shipping it pre-assembled is fine but given we're talking about a $500 investment here I'd want it to not break in a year or at least to be semi-repairable if it does.
Can you use USB3 (whatever gen crap it is) for this application maybe?
I can drive an occulus quest2 via 8m of USB3 cable. The cable contains a fiber optic with a repeater hidden inside the female end. The total bandwidth this way is enough for the occulus quest2 at 90fps.
The goal here is wireless, a single thinner cable would be better but it's better to not have to worry about wires at all. And I'm not willing to set up a facebook account just for a Quest.
The Vive Wireless Adapter (VWA) is a PCIe card (single slot/low profile/mitx length). The output from the card is an SMA connector with a RF signal that goes to the antenna, max official length is 2 meters (and it isn't another SMA on the other end, it's hardwired into the antenna, so you have to use an extension, meaning multiple SMA connectors in the middle). I've seen people use some fairly long extension cables, but that attenuates the signal somewhat. It's probably fine but it's undesirable.
There are USB wireless adapters (TPLink makes one iirc) but generally they are agreed to be an inferior solution in various respects - higher CPU usage, higher latency, worse signal quality, a green bar on the top, etc. This is basically an ideal use-case for WiGig, it was literally designed to be a wireless display transmitter, and that's what the Vive Wireless Adapter uses inside, it's actually an off-the-shelf Intel WiGig card. The TPCast uses a much lower-bandwidth solution and compresses it much harder and that requires more latency, more oomph on the PC, and still gets a worse signal quality.
But, the WiGig card only has a short cable to the antenna. Solution: put the card in an enclosure and mount the enclosure on the wall, run the cables to the PC. Problem: thunderbolt also only runs 2 meters. Solution: optical thunderbolt cables. The rest is solvable from there.
The other reason I haven't raced into it is that HTC hasn't kept it up with the newer hardware. The Vive Pro has a higher-res screen and the VWA can only run at (iirc) 3/4ths resolution. It's still a better screen, there's less Screen Door Effect, but when you're talking about dropping around $1000 to get wireless working flawlessly and tucked away into the walls, it better be fucking flawless. On paper the WiGig actually has three channels and should be able to send on all three at once, but this doesn't seem to be implemented...
Honestly the TPCast is probably a 90% solution, it probably chokes on the Vive Pro as well but maybe for $200 instead of $1000 that's acceptable. But it's tough for me to accept "good enough" when there's a technically better solution. The VWA is an absolutely ideal solution here. At one point there were some updates pushed that looks like Valve was working on it, but (with apologies to South Park)... in typical Valve fashion, "they just sort of got high, and wandered off..."
And then, the Index is just an all-around better headset... but it doesn't have a wireless solution at all right now (apart from maybe the TPCast?). It kinda sucks, drives me up the wall that there's no "perfect answer" here. Every solution has some large downsides.
> 3m is beyond the max cable length specified by Thunderbolt, so it requires active extenders (they're hidden in the plugs) and tight manufacturing and shielding. You're paying extra for the ability to break that max length spec, and it's one of only a handful of products that do it.
I'm pretty sure it's not breaking the spec. Are you sure about that claim?
And the main factor is almost always decibels of signal loss rather than length, isn't it?
> Also those Corning cables have a reputation for failing barely out of warranty even if they are treated very delicately. Amazon reviews are full of "my cable failed 1 year and 1 month after purchase and Corning told me to go eat a dick" type reviews.
My understanding is that the thunderbolt 2 ones reliably self-destruct but the thunderbolt 3 ones probably fixed it? At the very least they can take a lot of physical abuse.
> 10gbps half-duplex USB 3.1 cable
I don't think any of the high speed wires are ever half duplex?
> I'm pretty sure it's not breaking the spec. Are you sure about that claim?
Actually we're both wrong... it appears max length for a passive cable is 18 inches for full performance. Passive cables technically max out at 18 inches for 40gbps and drop to 20gbps at 2 meters. Past that you need an active cable (which has signal repeaters).
Active cables generally run up to 2 meters (the Apple is the first 3m active cable except for the Corning AOC cables), but in most cases (everyone except apple) you start dropping features like USB 3.1 or displayport. AFAIK Apple's solutions are unique in that they don't - like for example I looked up a 2 meter Belkin cable advertised as TB3 and it doesn't carry the DisplayPort channel.
Which is why the advice for Thunderbolt is "just shut up and pay apple their money".
Not absolutely positive what the official standard is - they might well only say the passive number (ie 18 inches) because active can obviously be more or less arbitrarily long with things like fiber, it might not make sense to define a maximum cable length in that context. Or they might amend it as they go... obviously Apple has now broken the 2 meter barrier with their active copper cable.
I thiiiiink this becomes 0.8m for a passive cable in USB4/TB4 as the official passive spec? CableMatters seems to have a 2 meter active cable out though.
> I don't think any of the high speed wires are ever half duplex?
High-speed is half-duplex, yeah. It looks like SuperSpeed is full-duplex though so I'm wrong on that bit.
I just remember it being a nightmare trying to use USB external hard drives (which would have been back in the USB 2.0/High-speed era when I used them last!) and reading/writing at the same time tanked performance far beyond what you'd get with even an internal HDD. Read or write, one at a time, mixing both was a trip to hell.
> 3m is beyond the max cable length specified by Thunderbolt, so it requires active extenders (they're hidden in the plugs) and tight manufacturing and shielding.
The ICs at both ends, tight manufacturing, and shielding are required even for a 0.5m Thunderbolt cable.
For a 3m cable, the manufacturing tolerances and shielding go up even higher, but they were still required even for short cables.
And? Apple used to sell a way more expensive than that TB2 cable if high price is your point and besides, saying Apple charges a premium price for a premium product (like this) is about as insightful as saying the sky is blue.
FWIW, Monoprice's 1m USB4/TB4 cable (100W) is $25.
https://www.monoprice.com/product?p_id=41946
Apple's cable is 3m, which is likely most of why it's more expensive.
https://www.apple.com/shop/product/MWP02AM/A/thunderbolt-4-p...
Their 1.8m cable is $129, so still >2x the price of competitors. It’s an extremely well made cable, but overkill, probably?
Do you have any of these? The photos show no markings on the cable at all, which is a bummer. If I get some I'll have to put zip tie tags on them to label them, otherwise I'll never remember which ones are the good ones or not.
3m is beyond the max cable length specified by Thunderbolt, so it requires active extenders (they're hidden in the plugs) and tight manufacturing and shielding. You're paying extra for the ability to break that max length spec, and it's one of only a handful of products that do it.
The only other one I'm aware of is the Corning Active Optical Cable series which costs $360 for a 10m Thunderbolt 3 cable or $479 for a 30m cable, or $215 for a 10m Thunderbolt 2 cable (ie slower and different connector, potentially needs a $50 converter on each end). Also those Corning cables have a reputation for failing barely out of warranty even if they are treated very delicately. Amazon reviews are full of "my cable failed 1 year and 1 month after purchase and Corning told me to go eat a dick" type reviews.
https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1577008-REG/optical_c...
Also, just FYI, but max length spec on a USB 4 cable (which will support Thunderbolt-like features) is 0.8m and you'll need to use special cables to get the full capabilities there too, you can't just use a $15 usb-c to usb-c cable you bought off amazon. Just like some usb-c cables only support usb 2.0 speeds, you won't get full-duplex 40gbps signaling out of a 10gbps half-duplex USB 3.1 cable. USB certification isn't magic, these are physics-based electrical/RF problems here and high-capability cables/devices require more expensive implementations.
But anyway go ahead and click through that B+H link and look through their thunderbolt 3 cable category for another 3-meter cable. You won't find any. If 2 meters is not enough... your options are Apple, Corning, or nothing.
The Apple premium is still a thing, but I'd expect competitors to clock in around $100 if/when they come out. There is always a steep price inflection once you move from passive cables to active cables or fiber. If you can avoid that, great, use a shorter cable. If you can't, you have to pay up. Not everyone can just move everything closer (eg running through walls) and it's always so disappointing to see people arguing against consumers having options just because they don't personally need them. No one is making you buy this, but the people who do now have an option they didn't before. That "if I'm not interested in a product then it shouldn't exist at all!" mindset seems to be extremely pervasive in the tech space and I just don't get it, not every product has to be aimed at you personally. It's "center of the universe syndrome" as one of my teachers liked to call it.
I've looked at the Corning cables for setting up a Vive Wireless Adapter that can be in a different room from my desktop rig (adapter goes in a Thunderbolt enclosure, mounted on the wall, thunderbolt optical cable goes through the walls...) but the price and the failures kinda scared me off. I get that this won't work for normies, but personally I'd prefer to have the transceivers and the fiber be separate so I can replace one or the other if needed. Shipping it pre-assembled is fine but given we're talking about a $500 investment here I'd want it to not break in a year or at least to be semi-repairable if it does.
Can you use USB3 (whatever gen crap it is) for this application maybe?
I can drive an occulus quest2 via 8m of USB3 cable. The cable contains a fiber optic with a repeater hidden inside the female end. The total bandwidth this way is enough for the occulus quest2 at 90fps.
The goal here is wireless, a single thinner cable would be better but it's better to not have to worry about wires at all. And I'm not willing to set up a facebook account just for a Quest.
The Vive Wireless Adapter (VWA) is a PCIe card (single slot/low profile/mitx length). The output from the card is an SMA connector with a RF signal that goes to the antenna, max official length is 2 meters (and it isn't another SMA on the other end, it's hardwired into the antenna, so you have to use an extension, meaning multiple SMA connectors in the middle). I've seen people use some fairly long extension cables, but that attenuates the signal somewhat. It's probably fine but it's undesirable.
There are USB wireless adapters (TPLink makes one iirc) but generally they are agreed to be an inferior solution in various respects - higher CPU usage, higher latency, worse signal quality, a green bar on the top, etc. This is basically an ideal use-case for WiGig, it was literally designed to be a wireless display transmitter, and that's what the Vive Wireless Adapter uses inside, it's actually an off-the-shelf Intel WiGig card. The TPCast uses a much lower-bandwidth solution and compresses it much harder and that requires more latency, more oomph on the PC, and still gets a worse signal quality.
But, the WiGig card only has a short cable to the antenna. Solution: put the card in an enclosure and mount the enclosure on the wall, run the cables to the PC. Problem: thunderbolt also only runs 2 meters. Solution: optical thunderbolt cables. The rest is solvable from there.
The other reason I haven't raced into it is that HTC hasn't kept it up with the newer hardware. The Vive Pro has a higher-res screen and the VWA can only run at (iirc) 3/4ths resolution. It's still a better screen, there's less Screen Door Effect, but when you're talking about dropping around $1000 to get wireless working flawlessly and tucked away into the walls, it better be fucking flawless. On paper the WiGig actually has three channels and should be able to send on all three at once, but this doesn't seem to be implemented...
Honestly the TPCast is probably a 90% solution, it probably chokes on the Vive Pro as well but maybe for $200 instead of $1000 that's acceptable. But it's tough for me to accept "good enough" when there's a technically better solution. The VWA is an absolutely ideal solution here. At one point there were some updates pushed that looks like Valve was working on it, but (with apologies to South Park)... in typical Valve fashion, "they just sort of got high, and wandered off..."
And then, the Index is just an all-around better headset... but it doesn't have a wireless solution at all right now (apart from maybe the TPCast?). It kinda sucks, drives me up the wall that there's no "perfect answer" here. Every solution has some large downsides.
> 3m is beyond the max cable length specified by Thunderbolt, so it requires active extenders (they're hidden in the plugs) and tight manufacturing and shielding. You're paying extra for the ability to break that max length spec, and it's one of only a handful of products that do it.
I'm pretty sure it's not breaking the spec. Are you sure about that claim?
And the main factor is almost always decibels of signal loss rather than length, isn't it?
> Also those Corning cables have a reputation for failing barely out of warranty even if they are treated very delicately. Amazon reviews are full of "my cable failed 1 year and 1 month after purchase and Corning told me to go eat a dick" type reviews.
My understanding is that the thunderbolt 2 ones reliably self-destruct but the thunderbolt 3 ones probably fixed it? At the very least they can take a lot of physical abuse.
> 10gbps half-duplex USB 3.1 cable
I don't think any of the high speed wires are ever half duplex?
> I'm pretty sure it's not breaking the spec. Are you sure about that claim?
Actually we're both wrong... it appears max length for a passive cable is 18 inches for full performance. Passive cables technically max out at 18 inches for 40gbps and drop to 20gbps at 2 meters. Past that you need an active cable (which has signal repeaters).
Active cables generally run up to 2 meters (the Apple is the first 3m active cable except for the Corning AOC cables), but in most cases (everyone except apple) you start dropping features like USB 3.1 or displayport. AFAIK Apple's solutions are unique in that they don't - like for example I looked up a 2 meter Belkin cable advertised as TB3 and it doesn't carry the DisplayPort channel.
Which is why the advice for Thunderbolt is "just shut up and pay apple their money".
https://appleinsider.com/articles/17/08/15/psa-thunderbolt-3...
Not absolutely positive what the official standard is - they might well only say the passive number (ie 18 inches) because active can obviously be more or less arbitrarily long with things like fiber, it might not make sense to define a maximum cable length in that context. Or they might amend it as they go... obviously Apple has now broken the 2 meter barrier with their active copper cable.
I thiiiiink this becomes 0.8m for a passive cable in USB4/TB4 as the official passive spec? CableMatters seems to have a 2 meter active cable out though.
> I don't think any of the high speed wires are ever half duplex?
High-speed is half-duplex, yeah. It looks like SuperSpeed is full-duplex though so I'm wrong on that bit.
I just remember it being a nightmare trying to use USB external hard drives (which would have been back in the USB 2.0/High-speed era when I used them last!) and reading/writing at the same time tanked performance far beyond what you'd get with even an internal HDD. Read or write, one at a time, mixing both was a trip to hell.
https://www.ramelectronics.net/USB-3.aspx
2 replies →
> 3m is beyond the max cable length specified by Thunderbolt, so it requires active extenders (they're hidden in the plugs) and tight manufacturing and shielding.
The ICs at both ends, tight manufacturing, and shielding are required even for a 0.5m Thunderbolt cable.
For a 3m cable, the manufacturing tolerances and shielding go up even higher, but they were still required even for short cables.