The new software leverages Thunderbolt technology to get more out of your PCs at home or in the office.
  • ShittyBeatlesFCPres@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    2 months ago

    Yeah, this sounds amazing. It also sounds like it’s being limited, unfortunately, and will require additional license fees from the OEM on top of the Thunderbolt 4 ports. Hopefully, that’s just for the launch and it opens up soon.

    Apple has had “target disk mode” for a long time where you boot one computer into a special mode but that’s basically just for transferring files and not anything like as advanced. I know iPads (and I assume Android tablets) can be a second screen over wireless using third party software but it’s not uncompressed video with disk access last I checked.

    • Kidplayer_666@lemm.eeEnglish
      0·
      2 months ago

      Yeah, I’ve used third party software to get tablets as wireless monitors, but it has mostly sucked. Hopefully it’ll be opened soon. Tho if they started with it closed, that’s how it’ll remain. Apple has the target disk mode, but doesn’t the laptop need to be shut down for it to work? Besides, APFS or whatever they use is useless when compared to literally anything else

      • abhibeckert@lemmy.worldEnglish
        0·
        2 months ago

        Apple has the target disk mode, but doesn’t the laptop need to be shut down for it to work?

        Modern Macs can’t do Target Disk Mode. If you had the right cables (thunderbolt or firewire) it was really fast, just as quick as a high end internal PCIe SSD.

        And yes, you did need to reboot - because the other computer had full arbitrary read/write access to the raw sectors on the drive with no safety checks or security. If you did that while the computer was running normally, you’d corrupt the data on the disk as soon as they both tried to do a write operation at the same time — and also TDM needed to be used with caution - the other computer could easily install a rootkit or steal all your saved passwords.

        It’s been replaced with “Mac Sharing Mode” which operates while the Mac is running normally, does have all the necessary algorithms in place to avoid corrupting the disk, full security to authenticate each read/write operation and block attempts to mess with system files, and therefore is orders of magnitude slower than TDM.