The technology inside Apple's $50 Thunderbolt cable

Re:The technology inside Apple's $50 Thunderbolt cable by dasil003 on Thursday August 18, 2011 @08:53PM (#2901770)

I'm going to go out on a limb and say that Thunderbolt will be more successful than Firewire. It won't trickle down to the cheapo stuff, but it's not designed for that. What it really does is solve the external storage problem for low-profile devices (Air, and eventually maybe even iPad) allowing professionals to finally leave their Mac Pros behind and move to an Air + Thunderbolt Display "docking station" setup that is an order of magnitude increase in freedom and convenience.

Other vendor adoption is not as much of a problem as it was for Firewire (or SCSI for that matter) because Apple's position is so much stronger today. Thunderbolt can go far on Apple's ticket alone. I know I'll be willing to pay a premium for active cabling if it means the data rates hold up to their advertised potential.

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Re:The technology inside Apple's $50 Thunderbolt cable by bugsy on Thursday August 18, 2011 @09:17PM (#2901828)

I agree that's going out on a limb, a bold move. It seems to me the adoption curve and history of Apple dropping fringe technologies they grow bored with after significant investment by a few firms will keep adoption far below FW rates. USB 3 has supplanted USB 2 for high speed disk access already. That battle is over and done with before Apple has even entered the race. Very high speed external disk access uses eSATA.

For video cameras, it will be USB 3 for everything other than Sony which has its own special precious non-compatible variation Thunderbolt that only works on VAIOs since Sony loves to play the special precious protocol game with their little princess friend Apple.

In 5 years no one will support Thunderbolt and Apple will be on to some new thing. Between now and then there will be at most a dozen devices supported, and all massively overpriced. The failure to adopt USB 3 and BluRay, in addition to their locking down their OS to be iOS with Big Screen will lead to Apple losing significant market share. After the big plunge in a few years, people will say that things all went wrong when Tim "Cost Cutting at any Cost" Cook was foolishly put at the helm rather than someone, anyone, with the slightest design sense, taste, or concern for the customer's experience.

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Re:The technology inside Apple's $50 Thunderbolt cable by dasil003 on Friday August 19, 2011 @01:06AM (#2902318)

Your post is very entertaining, but let's bookmark and come back in 5 years.

The reason I don't buy your argument is because I think in practice Thunderbolt is going to be well more than twice as fast as either USB 3.0 or eSATA, and the smart cabling is a future-proofing engineering move that will make sense as drives and busses become faster. If that pans out, then Apple will be in good shape with this technology to not have to fuck with it for the next 5-10 years, and the pros will happily pay the premium.

As for the Lion hate, well, my biggest fear is that people eat it up and they are emboldened to move quickly to an App-Store-only model. Until that day though you still have a respectable Unix + The Best Commercial Apps OS that led so many geeks to Apple over the last decade.

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Re:The technology inside Apple's $50 Thunderbolt cable by Hyena on Friday August 19, 2011 @12:40AM (#2902265)

"For video cameras, it will be USB 3 for everything other than Sony which has its own special precious non-compatible variation Thunderbolt that only works on VAIOs since Sony loves to play the special precious protocol game with their little princess friend Apple."

I love this so much.

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