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TidBITS#1345/07-Nov-2016

First off, if you’re a U.S. citizen, please go vote on Tuesday for the candidates whose experience you believe best qualifies them for the jobs at hand. Elections aren’t about picking a new best friend or making a statement; they’re how we hire high-level employees whose actions will affect the entire planet. Meanwhile, back in the Apple world, if you’ve seen several seemingly identical iTunes updates in the past week, you’re not going crazy — Adam Engst explains what happened, though the differences between the updates remain a mystery. Julio Ojeda-Zapata reviews Feed Hawk, which makes it easier to subscribe to RSS feeds on iOS. Many Apple users are annoyed by the number of peripheral adapters they’ll need for a new Thunderbolt 3-only MacBook Pro, but thankfully Apple is temporarily cutting prices on its Thunderbolt 3 and USB-C accessories. And if the complicated world of Thunderbolt 3 and USB-C has you boggled, Glenn Fleishman joins us to explain what each of these standards is, how they relate to each other, and what other protocols they support. Notable software releases this week include Fantastical 2.3 and Nisus Writer Pro 2.1.6.

Glenn Fleishman 62 comments

Explaining Thunderbolt 3, USB-C, and Everything In Between

The new MacBook Pro laptops are the first Macs with Thunderbolt 3, a standard that uses the USB-C plug style and retains USB compatibility. But what’s most interesting about Thunderbolt 3 is how it supports numerous other protocols, including USB, Thunderbolt 2, FireWire, DisplayPort, and Ethernet, with the addition of appropriate adapters.