Category Archives: Tech

New Dock Connector

Posted on by Mamu
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New Dock Connector

And now, my worthless thoughts on Apple’s arguably ubiquitous dock connector and the potential upcoming change:

Since the third generation iPod, Apple has used a physically standard and almost consistent electrically standard proprietary Dock connector on almost all of its media devices.  Of course there were exceptions, primarily where iPod Shuffles were concerned, and we all remember the debacle of the change in the electrical pin outs around the time of the iPhone 3G (except for those of us who don’t remember the debacle), but by and large the Dock Connector has remained true and now devices and peripherals abound in greater quantity than ever as the iOS device family continues to rule the consumer electronics world.

There have been rumors circulating that the next iPhone, due potentially as early as late this year, will sport a new, physically different Dock connector.  This would supposedly be a narrower connection, potentially shorter in height as well.  Somewhat obviously the pins could go one of two ways: denser packing of the thirty pins, or a reduction in pins down to a smaller number (as few as four) – this is based on nothing except my assumption that we’d need at least data+, data-, power+, and power- or ground.  As I understand it now, not all 30 of the pins are used anyway – data, power, several grounds, one or two video output types, and a couple pins of audio, or something like that.  The point isn’t so much electrical anyway, it’s the physical port.  And a new physical port would be electrically different anyway.

Consider the number of speaker docks, the number of integrated car audio systems, the number of gadgets that connect to the dock connector, and the massive number of chargers out there that all have the Dock Connector.  There is a lot of that stuff out there.  Imagine all of them rendered natively unusable in a single product release.

Of course they’d still be compatible with current devices. A new device wouldn’t retroactively ruin them.  And of COURSE there would be adapters which would make 99.9% of the devices compatible.  But adapters… they’re a little bit loathsome.  Plus, each one would probably be sold to the tune of 10-20 dollars and that’s just rampant opportunism by vendors…

I suppose it would be economically helpful in general.  Most of us would buy a new charger, a new car charger, a new case for the new device of course, and maybe even a handful of the adapters for our old stuff.  Money would flow.  We’d accept the new connector because we’d have to.  But would it bring us anything but lighter wallets?

The iPhone is thicker than the current Dock Connector.  The Apple wants to continually make the iPhone thinner, despite heat and battery life issues, not to mention fragility, so they still have room to play.  The iPod Touch, barely thicker than the Dock Connector but it still is.  Same for the Nano.  Certainly the iPad is significantly thicker than the connector.  So in a sense, to some of us logical thinkers, the thickness of the Dock Connector is not an issue.  Neither is the width.  Drop width in place of thickness in the preceding paragraph and everything still holds up.

Apparently there’s still room for options in the current Dock Connector electrically, or at least there was.  With the iPhone 4 and 4S and iPad 2we saw Dock to VGA connectors show up where there weren’t any before.  This new connection does not preclude use of the Dock to Component cables (that I am aware of) or even the Dock to Composite cables.  Then the Dock to HDMI shows up.  So with either different pins or creative use of the same pins – they’re still shoehorning in functionality.

What’s to be gained by changing the Dock Connector?  I feel I’ve ruled out physical dimensions safely enough for myself.  We’re not getting Firewire back that’s for sure. In fact it’s only vaguely worth mentioning because we lost Firewire for the same reason we won’t be getting Thunderbolt iOS devices anytime soon (no matter how badly we want them).  Firewire was never a native component of whatever kind of cpu and chipset was part of any iPod – it required separate chips which required space and expense.  With the ubiquity of USB and the waning interest in Firewire, it was booted.  Similarly, Thunderbolt has limited availability on host devices, requires expensive separate chips in the device, and the cables are fifty freakin’ dollars or more.  What’s a conventional dock cable go for, a dime straight from Hong Kong?  Anyway, there’s no space to put that chip in an iPhone.  Maybe in an iPad but I’m not even sure about that.  Then there’s the power requirements of the yet to be truly optimized Thunderbolt controllers as well as the fact that I have no clue whether a Thunderbolt port must remain a physical Thunderbolt port in which case it would have to be the only port or sit alongside another port for USB, lest we get more chips involved to adapt the Thunderbolt signals to USB to plug into (almost all other) computers out there.  Plus, USB is strange about the physical ports it allows, so that might not even be allowed.  Point is, it’s a total mess, and we probably won’t see it soon.

Thunderbolt could also open us up for Mini DisplayPort out of iOS devices but since, as far as I know, there are exactly three Mini DisplayPort monitors out there… and then adapters for HDMI, DVI, and VGA.  No real point to Mini DisplayPort.

Since the rumor mills are pointing to an overdue appearance of USB 3.0 in the new upcoming Macs (very strictly a rumor), maybe we can hope to see that in a future device.  Maybe that will be the payoff for a new Dock Connector (again, if we even see one).  That’d be nice.  I wouldn’t have to grit my teeth and plan my day around the syncing of my GPS app.  It wouldn’t take an immeasurable amount of time to reload all my stuff when I have to restore my iPhone.  Granted it’s only immeasurable because of my impatience but still…

I admit this is an exercise in futility.  We don’t know what Apple will do with the next iPhone.  We could well see the same exact connector with the same exact USB 2.0.  We could see a new connector with absolutely no new features and merely additional headaches.  We could see a new wonder connector ready to take us into the future.  Odds are we won’t see an EU-appeasing microUSB port but that’s out there too.  My objective was to make an attempt at theorizing what was more likely than the rest of the potentialities out there.  Even now, as I examine the pin out diagram of the modern Dock Connector and see no provisions for video, and yet there are several video adapters out there, it just reminds me that I’m not an electrical engineer and in fact do not know exactly how everything works.  But conjecture is a fun time killer.  Sometimes we’re left feeling clever.  Sometimes we’re left feeling dumber.

But those new Macs.  That new phone.  Ever mere months away.  And then we’ll see.

New Drive: SSD

Posted on by Mamu
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Notes regarding my recent switch of my Macbook Unibody White hard drive to an SSD:

I bought the SSD (Kingston SSDNow V series 64 GB) because I understood it to be a good one and the price was right (on sale with rebate bringing the price of the drive to 110 dollars after all was said and done.) I figured it was a good idea given SSD benefits such as low power requirements, resilience, low noise (not that this was an issue in the MacBook), and speed. Granted, this is a medium consumer grade SSD and at least a generation behind in SSD technology but I thought it might be worth a shot. I’m interested in the potential of SSDs and it seemed like the time to jump in.

I haven’t done anything resembling scientific testing, mind you. Haven’t even bothered. I wouldn’t know what to do for that kind of thing anyway. But I can make note of what I’ve seen.

First thing was that I was ill prepared for how small a space the SSD offers. Certainly I knew it was only 64 gigabytes to begin with but I hadn’t really made much of a dent in my 500 gigabyte drive in the MacBook as it was. Still, formatted the drive is in the range of a mere 58 gigabytes and my entire drive’s contents would not fit. I left out large amounts of data I could safely leave behind and imaged the rest of the drive to the SSD. Now, I might have expected this portion to be faster but there were significant bottlenecks such as the SSD being tethered to a USB 2.0 interface as well as the speed of the current drive.

I left the drive to image in its own time and returned and swapped out the drives. Curiously, I found first that the process had worked (a pleasant surprise), and that the boot process was not faster but slower. This is an issue I have yet to work out as I don’t believe it to be the fault of the SSD exactly, but rather an issue with the Mac finding the SSD to be the boot disk. After the Apple appears, boot is no more than about five seconds, with the total time to a ‘usable desktop’ being no more than about seven or eight, not counting actually typing in my password. So boot time is, pretty much, very very fast. However… I don’t boot that often. The machine sleeps, I don’t turn it off.

Wake from sleep is fast, definitely much faster than it is with a regular hard drive, so that’s helpful. The machine has not instantly become any kind of speed demon but it does seem plenty perky, over all maybe a bit more than it had been. It’s tricky to say, as this particular machine has impressed me with how swift it can be given its modest outfitting (2.26 GHz Core2Duo cpu with 3 MB L2 cache and 2 GB DDR3-1066 MHz RAM shared with the integrated Geforce 9400 graphics).

Battery life has not skyrocketed through the roof either. But I don’t think I’ve done a full drain and charge just yet so that’d be worth monitoring.

Trash empties fast. Using the ‘XSlimmer’ utility to strip out excess languages and legacy code from the Applications folder was swift but not mind blowing fast.

The place where the hard drive is is definitely cooler to the touch. At least there’s that. I don’t mind that at all.

And while I was so very concerned before, almost half of the drive remains available at the moment so I suppose I was fair but overzealous in my slimming down of, basically, all of my data, which was not very crucial at all and will be fine on the old drive where it remains for now.