Probably see more and more of this as cables continue the trend of becoming computers that abstract the communication between the two plugs.
Between this and "Help, Bing Won’t Stop Declaring Its Love for Me", man... HN headlines are making me laugh today.
Keep it up, technological progress! :)
Can you brick your cable if you unplug it during the upgrade?
There’s no way to directly update the cable, but it should update automatically when plugged into your Mac. While you can check the firmware of your power adapter by attaching it to your Mac and clicking on the Apple logo in the top left corner of the menu bar, then About This Mac, System Report, and Power, it’s not clear how to check the specific firmware version of the cable.
So presumably there is some UART to the cable, and the cable to the power adapter. Is it all stuffed in the cable treated as a USB device or is there some proprietary control on the laptop side to communicate with the cable?
"Everything that can physically accommodate a processor and be powered, will eventually have a processor"
- AnonymousWhat could possibly be the use for any sort of logic in such cable be, given that on both ends of it there’s already a computer as well?
> It’s not clear what the firmware fixes or patches
I'm on M2 MB Air, and it seems odd to me that it (seems to) runs off battery even when plugged in and fully charged. Mine has been plugged in at desk for over a week, every day when I get on it says it's "Power Source: Power Adapter" yet it battery charging goes "On Hold" and dwindles as if it's running off battery all day. For example, it's mid-day for me and I'm at 79% but it's never been unplugged.
My last was a MB Air 2013 so maybe this is new behavior that I'm just not used to, but it seems strange. If I had to unplug and leave, I'd expect to be leaving with 100% charge.
Edit: "Optimized Battery Charging" was turned on as commenter mentioned, thanks for the tech support HN!
I was having problems charging with my magsafe cable and for the last month was using the usb-c port to charge. Today i took if of the drawer and it is magically working again. I am using the beta mac os 13.2 so it may have solved my problem.
I've had a new MacBook Air M2 for a few weeks now. I've been charging exclusively with a USB-C charger. Is there any advantage to charging via magsafe?
I’m really surprised that these cables have updatable firmware. Surely that makes the attack surface that much larger?
When you have so much money and you don't know how to spend it... this is what you get.
In a few more years, security will simply cease to exist entirely.
Apple's lightning-to-HDMI cable contains an embedded ARM SoC with 256MB of memory running the XNU kernel and a daemon that performs video decoding.
https://panic.com/blog/the-lightning-digital-av-adapter-surp...