“For Thunderbolt fans hoping that the high-speed interface will catch on, we’ve got more bad news: an Acer representative talking to CNET has said that the company has no plans to support Thunderbolt in its PCs this year,” Andrew Cunningham reports for Ars Technica.
“Acer’s Aspire S5 Ultrabook was one of the few Windows laptops to include Thunderbolt support when it was introduced in early 2012,” Cunningham reports. “By itself, the news of one company distancing itself from Thunderbolt might not be a big deal, but this is just another example of the trouble that Thunderbolt faces two-and-a-half years after its public introduction in the 2011 MacBook Pro.”
Cunningham reports, “Cost is one of the primary obstacles facing Thunderbolt—the cost of the cables, the cost of licensing, and the extra cost of putting the separate controller chip into PCs are all significant hurdles. Some relief may come when (or if) Intel begins to integrate Thunderbolt into its chipsets, which certainly boosted adoption of USB 3.0 when that interface became natively supported by Ivy Bridge’s 7-series chipsets. Until then, though, Thunderbolt’s chicken-and-egg problem will persist.”
Read more in the full article here.
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