The HDMI Forum, responsible for the HDMI specification, continues to stonewall open source. Valve’s Steam Machine theoretically supports HDMI 2.1, but the mini-PC is software-limited to HDMI 2.0. As a result, more than 60 frames per second at 4K resolution are only possible with limitations.
Ah, the Apple strategy of forcing a standard.
EDIT: By that I mean when Apple started putting USB (1.0) on their Macs back in the day to encourage more USB accessories. Not their proprietary (what was the old iPod connector called?) or lightning BS.
You’re thinking of firewire, and that was not proprietary. Sony came up with that. I had a mini disc player with a firewire port. And thunderbolt, which is what they use now, is an evolution on firewire made by Apple, Sony, and Intel.
Both firewire and thunderbolt are superior to USB.
Got a Firewire port on my PS2. The only thing I’ve ever owned with Firewire and I never even used it.
I have an old iMac that I use as a Plex server, and it has a firewire 800 port and a thunderbolt 1 port, both of which I use for a couple of very old external drive enclosures. Sure as hell beats USB 2.0.
I always wanted a way to use that jack, still have no clue what it was for
I believe it was only utilized by Gran Turismo 3 for connecting two systems to play against each other. Nobody else developed for it.
The first time I ever used a firewire port, I thought it was black magic compared to usb. It was INSANELY faster and super consistent speed. It was the same level of wow as the first time I used an SSD vs HDD.
Compared to the top speed of USB 2.0, firewire 400 was actually faster in that regard (due to a consistent transfer rate rather than a variable one), and I’ll explain where the true performance came in to play, and how thunderbolt also has this amazing feature:
When usb connections begin to data transfer, they started at 0 Kb and slowly speed up to the maximum transfer rate. Then it slows down before completion. FireWire (and is successor, Thunderbolt) maintain a consistent data transfer speed. It begins at that transfer rate, and ends at that transfer rate. This is especially good if you’re moving around a large amount of small files.
Also, firewire 400 already beat out USB 2.0’s 382 Mb/s transfer rate. Firework 800 more than doubled it, and thunderbolt 1 started at 1.5 GB a second. We’re at thunderbolt 5 now, and I stopped keeping track of the data rates because they were so blazingly fast.
One drawback, however, is that firewire cables, and subsequently thunderbolt cables, are both extremely expensive and not very durable. They contain a lot more twisted copper wires, and tend to wear out faster. USB cables are nearly indestructible.
Additionally, firewire (and thunderbolt) are also a networking protocol. You can create an ad-hoc LAN just with firewire or thunderbolt cable cables. This is natively built into macOS, but, on Linux, it requires some sorcery to make it work. With a Mac, and an emergency, you can boot your Mac with a damaged hard to drive remote remotely from another functional Mac just by using a thunderbolt cable (or a firewire cable). It’s a neat trick, and has saved my ass more times than I can count.
One final awesome feature of thunderbolt 2+ is that a natively carries DisplayPort signals since switching to the USB 3 plug standard.
I was thinking of the 30 Pin Dock Connector, which was proprietary, but it looks like it used both FireWire and USB protocols.
Apple was known for helping propagate FireWire too.
Leave it to me to only consider the male end of the connector 😜
No, youngin’ they’re talking about USB. The original iMac was USB-only specifically to force the adoption of USB keyboards and mice.
This is what I was responding to. Also, they only sold that iMac for about a year, after which point iMacs came with FireWire ports.
And I’m in my 40s. I’m not a “youngin’”.