[deskpro]

What I'm excited about here is monitor hubs. You plug your monitor into a power socket, and peripherals into the monitor's USB ports.

You arrive at work, and only need to plug your laptop into the monitor. The monitor hub sends power and data from peripherals to your laptop. Your laptop sends video to the monitor all through the same cable.

[pdpi]

Yeah, that's basically what Apple offers today on their thunderbolt monitors (except those still need a separate power cable). Hopefully we'll actually see a wider adoption of the concept once it's on commodity USB-C instead of the massively expensive thunderbolt.

[post_break]

Only problem I've seen is that the thunderbolt hubs cost over $200, plus the cost of the cable. And even then they only have a few ports.

[pierrec]

The idea is that you can daisy-chain many devices without using a hub. Among thunderbolt devices, I believe most screens and high-end hard drives provide the two ports necessary for daisy-chaining. USB also supports this quite well, and high-end USB hard drives also generally include a port for this purpose.

It's an interesting comeback for the concept - it reminds me of daisy chaining PCs on their serial ports for playing Starcraft:

http://www.angelfire.com/nt/startupage/sc/FRAMES/SERIAL/3OR4...

[post_break]

I know you can daisy chain, my point being that you get only a few ports, per $200+ device. Vs USB 3 where added usb ports, ethernet, etc is $20 a device.

[lsaferite]

Interesting note I haven't seen mentioned, the Alt mode negotiation is only possible for directly connected devices as it does not traverse hubs.