“Apple proved today that it is firmly behind Thunderbolt as a standard for the future of Mac computing,” Darrell Etherington reports for GigaOM. “It put not one, but two of the new high-speed I/O ports on the new 27-inch iMac, as if to firmly reinforce the point.”
Some are hailing it as the FireWire replacement, but here are five reasons why Thunderbolt is actually a much bigger deal than that:
1. It Will Change How We Think About External Storage (Thunderbolt will make external storage as fast as internal storage, so that you can expand your machine’s potential storage capacity almost infinitely without making any performance sacrifices.)
2. It Will Allow for Everything HD All the Time
3. It Will Extend Beyond Macs (Think iOS devices)
4. It Will End Your Connectivity Limitations
5. It Will Only Get Better With Time
Read more in the full article here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Dow C.” for the heads up.]
iOS devices will not able to handle that superhot Thunderbold controller Intel created.
It will take time for that chip to be miniaturized enough to have lower electricity consumption.
Does it need to have low power consumption if the same connection is charging the iOS device?
It will not help much, since the core problem here is not voltage level, but the sheer volume of processing needed — imagine that controller has to work at speed that provides 40 Gbit/s transfer.
well (echo, echo, echo, echo)……………………………….certainly can’t tell by this thread.
DISCLAIMER: At the time of the above posting this was the only post in the thread, thereby, ironically, negating the very claim in the title of the post that “Thunder bolt is a big deal”.
Thunderbolt is clearly going to be awesome for several classes of device, and I can’t wait for all those devices to start hitting the market.
Thunderbolt aside, where the hell is the USB 3 interface that would work great with all the cameras and hard drives ALREADY on store shelves and on people’s physical desktops? The millions of video- and still cameras, hard drives, and other doodads people buy aren’t going to be Thunderbolt anytime soon.
Somehow, I see a repeat of FireWire coming here… There will be a few devices that use it and they’ll be awesome (but much more expensive, of course), and we’ll all be stuck with USB 2 for everything else… for years while Apple tries to “establish the standard”. Macs with USB 3 will probably be available starting sometime in 2014.
This is Apple and Intel working together, with Apple getting a head start. So, no, not the same senario as FireWire.
This is more like USB 1.0
That was an Intel technology that Apple was the first to really push. Everyone had the same, lame response as you have.
This is Apple and Intel getting together to create the future optical-based connection technology. This first version, though not optical, is still fantastic.
Get a tb to usb3 adaptor. The great thing about tb is it’s basically pci express as a port rather than a plugin pci card on your motherboard. So it supports sata, fw 400, 800, usb1,2,3, hdmi, serial or whatever. Or combinations of such. Rather than having lots of different redundant ports you can just have 1 superfast one with adaptors. It’s also about 10 times faster, USB 3 in practice never gets above 460mb/s in both directions. Tb is 10gbps _each_ direction.
By 2014 USB will be strictly legacy and everything will be Thunderbolt plus adapters for whatever you need to have now.
Any pray tell, where are the devices that actually use Thunderbolt or adapt it’s output to FW 800.
Another connector? … and only Apple is using, ive been down this road so many times… Im still trying to get my new Apple monitor to work with anything older then a year… no adapter for the new, not so new DisplayPort (which should have been HDMI). If they are going to be so cutting edge, please make adapters! Thanks in advance.
“Another connector? … and only Apple is using, ive been down this road so many times… ”
Yeah, in other words; exactly like USB. Boo Hoo.
@ Doug Thunderbolt is essentially an existing mini display port. There are adapters for display port to older display connectors out there. Do a Google search or even look up on Apple’s store site.
LaCie has a Thunderbolt drive slated for summer:
http://www.lacie.com/us/products/product.htm?id=10549
@RDF
Before there can be a supply, there has to be a demand. Apple is selling computers with Thunderbolt so that peripheral manufacturers have a customer base to sell to.
Putting Thunderbolt on every Mac creates that potential customer base. Thunderbolt peripheral sales will cause other manufacturers to add Thunderbolt support, and then it snowballs from there.
I’m sorry; were you under the impression that device manufacturers create devices with a specific connector first and “THEN” computers start to show up with that connector?!
Seriously?!
Too bad that Thunderbolt can’t be added to Mac Pros with a PCI card. Makes you wonder, though. Could it be that Intel designed this technology to force people to discard what would otherwise be perfectly good computers? No, I’m sure a big company like that has nothing but our best interests at heart and would never pull a dick move like that!
Thunderbolt is so fast that even the fastest PCI bus can’t support its speed. It’s not diabolical, its physics.
I just had a thought that perhaps the next iOS devices will all ship with 30 pin to Thunderbolt cables with Thunderbolt to USB 2 adapters first time then make the adapter a $10 option in the Sept 2012 models going forward. Or Apple could start with a 30 pin to Thunderbolt cable accessory this September or even sooner. That would help drive Thunderbolt enabled Mac sales over the next few years right?
If possible, I would like to see some kind of external graphics card that can boost my Mac’s graphics capabilities though the Thunderbolt connection.