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New MacBook Pros To Sport Light Peak Technology
An anonymous reader writes "Over the past few years, Apple has systematically upgraded the base level MacBook to a level where the difference between the Pro and consumer models were arguably becoming negligible. That's about to change. Apple will reportedly introduce a completely re-designed MacBook Pro this April that will borrow features from the recently released MacBook Air. The new Pros will reportedly come with an SSD and Light Peak technology, a transfer protocol capable of 10 Gbps both up and down. Light Peak, jointly developed by Intel and Apple, will reportedly be an Apple exclusive at first."
Let's drop VGA, DVI, HDMI, DisplayPort, FireWire 400, FireWire 800, USB 3 and only use two types of ports: USB 2.0 for the low-cost/low-bandwidth stuff and LightPeak for everything else.
Wait, what about my old EZ135 SCSI drive? Those carts have 135 MEGABYTES each! That's a lot of data! Oh, my USB flash drive can store 118 of those carts, never mind.
you mean, via lightpeak ?
The Cloud - because you don't care if your apps and data are up in the air.
Light Peak is a design that is intended to replace the myriad of bus technologies present in the average computer.
For example...in my current rig, I have IDE, SATA (both 1.5 and 3gb versions, no SATA/6Gb),eSATA, USB & Firewire.
Light Peak is an optical technology eventually destined to replace all these different specifications into one 10GB/s-capable-today bus, with speeds expected to reach 100GB/s+ by 2020.
(All this info, and more, from TFA)
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are we in for $30+ adapters to use usb e-net / dvi / vga / hdmi / display port / firewire?
Does ATI and NVIDIA video work over light-peak? Or will you need some kind of voodoo 1 daisy-chained cable setup?
also what about mouses and key boards light peak is extreme overkill in them?
What will light peak hubs and cables cost?
how much power can a cable pass?
Will you need a powered hub / powered adapters for DVI / VGA / Display port out?
they need to keep the Ethernet port.
What about sound?
Chicken and Egg.
If laptops have the ports people will develop devices for it. That Macs are -known- to be coming with them then it's highly likely that peripheral manufacturers are creating devices that use it to be ready for the release.
Anybody got a source for that? Other than an Apple-fanboy-page.
The LightPeak page at Intel Research doesn't even mention Apple at all, but do mention partners like Sony and several others.
Some tech sites, blogs and fanboy pages have been posting claims/rumours of Apple involvement, but with Intel not acknowledging this, and even promoting Sony and others as partners, it doesn't seem very likely.
Hm. I like apple products, and some here have accused me of being a fanatic. But looking at my history, it's more like this:
Year 1: buy $1100 laptop. Give old laptop to wife.
Year 2: remain happy with laptop.
Year 3: remain happy with laptop.
Year 4: remain happy with laptop.
Year 5: Wife spills coffee on her laptop. Give "new" laptop to wife, buy $1100 laptop.
All years: Consider phone, put it off for a year because work pays for crappy blackberry.
This past year: Consider iPad, put it off for the time being.
I guess I'm just not enough of a zealot.
The CB App. What's your 20?
linux and windows have TRIM, so when will OSX have it?
Being optical, and Mac exclusive, it should manage to be even more expensive than Firewire! Progress!
Here you go.
Don't worry. Like USB in the 90s, this technology will eventually become standard on PCs thanks to Apple forcing device manufacturers to support it for the Mac. And, like before, PC users won't acknowledge yet another one of Apple's contributions to computing standards. Instead, like always, there will be more outdated one-button mouse jokes.
Well who knows how it will work in Apple land. They are known for forcing changes because they think they are cool, whether it is time or not. For other manufacturers, Light Peak is just going to be another port at first. It isn't going to replace anything. Capabilities aside, you need to wait as peripherals get support. The first things I expect to see are external HDDs, and things like pro audio/video capture equipment. Video is going to be some time. No monitor today supports Light Peak (and relatively few even support DP) so it'll be some time. If it is to gain any traction, it'll have to have an interface to work with the high end discrete cards.
Even then it may need to develop a generation or so before it is useful 10gbps is not fast when you talk video. It is acceptable, but not fast. DP has 17gbits of bandwidth with its current standard, HDMI has 10gbits. So it is around as fast as current video standards, but offers no real speed advantage, which is really what it would take to force a change at this point. HDMI is heavily entrenched because it is what home theater gear uses. The reason to move to somethign else would be higher resolution, colour depth, and frame rate displays will need more. Say we want 2560x1600@30bpp@120Hz. That would need about 15gbits so DP could barely handle it, but nothing else. Now suppose we go with a 4k display, and 96bpp (32-bit floating point per colour to allow for HDR) again at 120Hz. Now we need 108gbps. So if a connector can offer much higher bandwidths, there'll be interest as we eventually want that for video, but at 10gbps Light Peak offers nothign the current ones don't. If Intel let's nVidia and AMD support it they probably will, but otherwise people will give it a miss.
For networking, no fucking way. Networking is stuck on Ethernet because networking uses Ethernet. It sounds like a tautology and that is really how it works. All local area nets are Ethernet. As such you have to support Ethernet to use them. As such all devices ship with Ethernet, as such all future stuff has to support it and so on. Nobody is going to redo their network to Light Peak. This is particularly true because 10gbE is already here, and really with networks even 1gig is really fast. Your network is local disk speed at that point. So you aren't going to convince people to dump their existing infrastructure for it.
In the long run Light Peak may become a popular somewhat universal computer interconnect but it is not happening any time soon. If Apple thinks they can force it they are wrong (for that matter they didn't force USB adoption, Mac users had to deal with it and then the industry moved that way at its own pace). However networking it will probably never replace, just because of the massive installed base of Ethernet.
Apple customers will subsidize the adoption of this technology, so I can buy a similar* laptop in 6 mos for much cheaper.
* For sufficiently loose definitions of "similar".
#DeleteChrome
It doesn't have to _replace_ ethernet.
Imagine a dock or port bar on your desk, you bring your laptop in plug in a single connector (although you may need power too, depends how Apple implement it) and everything on your deks now works, screen, keyboard, mouse, printer, ethernet... everything.
Thats something a LOT of laptop users have wanted for a very long time, and this is the potential in a standardized cable format not some propriety thing with 200 seperate wires so the slightest bend of the cable and you lose your display and have to buy a new dock/portbar
Normal people worry me!
Wikipedia says: "Apple brought the concept of Light Peak, an interoperable standard which could handle large amounts of data and replace the multitudinous connector types with a single universal connector, to Intel in 2007 with the intention of Intel producing and developing the technology."
However, I know that Slashdot is packed to the bring with suspiciously anonymous Apple-bashers these days and that they won't believe anything positive about Apple whatsoever. The only good company is Google.
"Sufferin' succotash."
"all the Mac users I know have little understanding about hardware, nor do they care to know about the hardware."
Not having to care is liberating.
I recently happened upon an old Popular Mechanics magazine from the 1950s. It dealt extensively with automotive topics. It struck me how much people had to know about their car's inner workings to properly maintain it. Today, you really don't have to know what kind of spark system your car has, or what kind of plugs it uses, or what kind of fuel delivery system it has. You don't have to clean varnish out of the carbuerator every year, or have the piston rings done at 60k miles. You don't have to replace the plugs and points every 10k miles. Just keep gas in it, make sure you change the oil, and take it somewhere for minor maintenance every year or two. It should go >100k without much in the way of repairs, and get mileage that cars in the 1950's couldn't even get close to.
I am a software developer. I use a macbook pro. It's great. I need something that works. I do not want to fuss with the OS, because I gain nothing from doing this and I honestly don't really care about it much. I want a powerful (i.e. *nix) CLI. I'd like to be able to play some music on it while I work. The mac does this and more better than any other computer I have used, regardless of OS. I can use it to accomplish work and not have to always figure out why it's acting weird now like I have had to do with every windows computer I have ever used since the dawn of time. I also don't have to spend time tweaking it out to make it behave like I have had to do with every linux desktop I have had for the last five or so years of using linux.
I don't know what the hardware internals are. All I know is that the display looks great, the aluminum case feels really solid (not some glued together plastic crap), it has crashed only once in a year (and this was due to the square turd known as java), every time I go to open it up it just works, and the trackpad is so awesome I don't even miss a mouse. By comparison, every other trackpad I have used to date has been so far inferior that it might as well have been an old broken NES controller hacked into the USB port, or even a couple of sticks tied together and plugged into the headphone jack. Apple got it right.
I dislike the Apple "cool factor" because it causes people to overlook the fact that Apple is making awesome computers with an OS waaaay superior to Windows because it has a *nix CLI under it and way better than linux distro X because it has the polish you'd expect from commercial software. Most people who dislike Apple, I find, have never actually gotten their hands on any of their products and dislike Apple based on principle. Apple has their flaws (iPhone 4 comes to mind + Jobs denial of said flaws), but let's not pretend that some dell laptop running windows 7 is even on the same level as a macbook pro.
blah blah blah
You're absolutely correct. Like when Apple stupidly introduced the iMac back in 1998 with no floppy drive and those bizarre little USB ports. Not to mention the colors and attention to design, which flew in the face of the beige-box standard. Considering that Macintosh only had market share of around 3%, peripheral manufacturers refused to waste time and resources supporting USB, and consumers ignored the iMac because floppy drives to this day remain a must-have for personal computers. The iMac failed dramatically as predicted by tech pundits, and it will be remembered as just another inane idea by Steve Jobs. So typical of Apple, to arrogantly believe that they can influence the tech industry with their pie-in-the-sky toys.
Wait...
I'll agree with you - most of my development these days is web development and iPhone / iPad development, but I still dabble back into industrial automation from time to time. I like my Mac Mini, for instance - it's solid, it's managed to survive three major OS upgrades since 2006, and it's still solid after four years of constant use. I like the "it just works" philosophy - I can focus on software development, not hardware troubleshooting. Apple isn't perfect, but the OS and Hardware combination is pretty damned good. (I will say, though, that after four years I'm finally going to upgrade the little box. This one will sit on the shelf and be a media box.)
The 'cool factor' is problematic - you're dead on right about that. But I've not been one to care too much about what everyone else thinks is cool anway ;-)
Davis Ray Sickmon, Jr - looking for something to read? Check out my three free novels at MidnightRyder.org
Well said. Similar situation for me. I used Linux for years, and eventually just got tired of fixing shit. The first time fixing every single problem is a challenge, and as a student I enjoyed picking the system apart and troubleshooting. It was a good experience. But when the wireless breaks again and again. When the video is crappy again and again, eventually it wears you down.
Up until last year I didn't own any mac products and didn't see a need to. Now I have an iMac at home and my faster Windows machine gets turned on maybe once a month. I have a Windows desktop machine at work, but use the Macbook whenever I can. Now I have an iPhone 4 for work, and it is fantastic. The thought that went into every detail is quite extraordinary. We tested the latest Android phones, and while they do most of the same things, they aren't anywhere close to the iPhone. I see it the same as for MP3 players and the iPod. When the iPod was released all the other mp3 players were arguably better from a features perspective. And yet the iPod dominated very quickly. Ease of use and thoughtful design beats raw features every time.
What pisses me off about this is that it's "Apple exclusive" at this point. Why the hell?
In doing so, they are pissing off many other vendors - HP, Lenovo/IBM, and Dell, to name a few, but certainly LSI would like the ability to license the technology.
I have been anxiously waiting for over a year for Intel to release this technology. It appears to be the one, great hope for a truly fast, inexpensive, and universal device interconnect.
Right now, we've got a handful of transport interconnects in the 8-12Gb/s range, all of which suck for one reason or another:
* 10Gb Ethernet - not such a bad option, as it can utilize older infrastructure fabric and can be used for networking topology, as well. Your storage can be easily transported over it using traditional network software.
* Fiberchannel - Expensive and very single-purpose, but still a better option than
* Infiniband - cheapest, but horrible support.
* Firewire - hitting a bandwidth limitation and hasn't really improved much in a while.
* USB 3.0 - bound by the host/guest model and host-oriented. Horribly CPU bound, still. Decent 'general purpose' when you don't need a decent inter-host transport.
* SAS - holds too much legacy crap in it from SCSI. Relatively cost, but you're still (usually) requiring one or more of the other device interconnects for a storage system.
The fact that Apple is holding onto the reigns of a single bus design which could change
The supreme irony is that Apple doesn't actually make anything which will be well suited to utilize Light Peak. Internetworking? Fast server storage? SAN? Nada: none of their platforms are suited for it, and pretty much anything you could do with Apple platforms can already be done using existing buses. (If anyone wonders why it might be said that Apple doesn't innovate, this is one good example: take something awesome and wrap it in pretty white plastic, doing nothing new with it.)
Talk about a disappointing "gimmick". Hopefully it'll reach mainstream within the next year or two, or it'll likely see an unfortunate demise similar to Firewire (low adoption rates, fringe technology), making Infiniband look all the more attractive.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
Yes, heaven forbid people know anything about their cars. Less knowledge! Thats what drives society forward!
Well thats the 'new car buyers' attitude all right, and you are paying a premium for that "luxury". Most people in the world however, drive cars with hundreds of thousands of kilometres on them and like to know what tire pressure is or what an alternator does. You don't have to be an electrical engineer to fix a car, and you dont have to be a hardware engineer to troubleshoot a computer. You make it seem like its so dificult and so much fuss to learn these things. If you cant do it on your own, take a course. Just like driving, or basic car repair for women that a co worker took recently - there are courses out there which will make you feel better about yourself. *Fun fact that I didnt even know that she learned in that course, if you turn the air conditioning on in the winter for a minute or so, it will suck all the moisture off of your windows and defog them much better than the fans do. Thats the kind of thing that really makes peoples lives a bit easier. Thats the kind of thing that a little knowledge brings.
Dumbing down and locking down systems has ALWAYS been what macs are about. This is why people hated them in the 90s, this is why people hate them today. You evidently want to buy into a world where you don't know how anything works and always have to rely on others to fix your problems for you. Sure its "liberating", but so is "finding god". What you call liberation, I call enslavement. Perception is everything I guess.
As a potential lottery winner, I totally support tax cuts for the wealthy
No, they shipped a computer that had no other low-speed interface ports on it for peripherals other than USB. You may remember it: the iMac.
This created a market for USB devices: mice, keyboard, scanners, printers, card readers etc that just was not taking off before that, since while some PC motherboards shipped with this "new fangled" USB port, it was poorly supported by Win95 (barely at all until late in the release cycle) and they still shipped (and continue to ship) with things like ps/2 ports, other din sockets, RS-232, 25 pin ports etc so people had no reason to specifically seek out USB devices on a bus that barely worked on Windows.
However, if you used an iMac, and many people did - it sold like hot cakes, and then soon after the iBook and other new Mac products you needed USB devices because it was the only peripheral port you had.
Also, I don;t recall Apple themselves actually claiming credit for anything - they just did what they did. I haven't seen any evidence they ever claimed they were taking credit for USB.
Also, if by "piggybacked on the efforts of Intel and the PC industry" you mean "adopted a standard that was designed to be used by hardware manufacturers to create a standard port and protocol for peripherals, ie DID EXACTLY WHAT IT WAS DESIGNED FOR" then I suppose you are correct. Apple adopting USB early in the game could only have been a positive thing for Intel, who developed the thing. What do you think they wanted Apple to do? Not use it? When you Apple haters get going, you just throw logic right out of the window, don't you?
The supreme irony is that Apple doesn't actually make anything which will be well suited to utilize Light Peak.
External storage. Hard drives are now a bit faster in practice than FW800, and a *lot* faster than USB2. Now, throw in multiple drives for a music or video setup. Which brings me to...
Music and video. FireWire is wildly successful here. As hard drives get faster (and SSDs begin to take hold), Light Peak can potentially replace FireWire, allowing for even *more* simultaneous HD video streams, etc.
(If anyone wonders why it might be said that Apple doesn't innovate, this is one good example: take something awesome and wrap it in pretty white plastic, doing nothing new with it.)
WiFi, USB, FireWire, magsafe, unibody cases, Face Time, iPhone, glass trackpads, iPod, the batteries in the current MacBooks, Bonjour, AirPrint, multitouch... The list of things Apple directly invented, co-invented, or were early adopters of is extensive. The notion that Apple doesn't innovate is way out there. It's extremely difficult to think of a company that innovates more than Apple!
Talk about a disappointing "gimmick". Hopefully it'll reach mainstream within the next year or two, or it'll likely see an unfortunate demise similar to Firewire (low adoption rates, fringe technology), making Infiniband look all the more attractive.
FireWire has been subject to demise? When exactly did this happen? It's not the dominant external bus, but it's very much alive and well. Apple had nothing to do with it's status of not being the dominant bus, the fact that it's so expensive is why (and that's also why it's such a great bus and is far from dead).
People buy Macs because they think they are worth the money, not because they aren't aware that you can buy other computers cheaper. Kinda like the same reason that people buy nice cars or any other product on the planet.
Lots of very technical people buy Macs. People who value good design.
Apple has had a lot to do with the current state of Firewire. They've removed it from their iPods and dropping it on their lower-end machines. They are also part of the reason it's so expensive, by charging licensing fees that pushed people to USB2 as it was cheaper. Firewire is not dead, but it's pretty much turned into a niche market at this point.
You know what's cool? Having spent enough time caring about computers, hardware and software to get a job that pays well enough that I really don't need to give a shit about buying some cheap ass Dell or HP laptop instead of a MacBook.
Barring that I know precisely what hardware is in my MacBook Pro. I know that Apple hardware is more expensive. I also know that my time is even more precious and expensive. So, having a computer that pretty much never fails and requires basically no tinkering is awesome. I'm at a point in my life where things like processor MHz mean far less to me than say a trackpad (something I use ALL THE TIME) that is very functional or extended battery life. These kinds of details are where Apple reigns supreme.
My MacBook still has a Core 2 Duo and on forums full of the nitwits who measure their penis by their i7, there is much weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth. In fact, they tell me they could get a Dell with an i7 for $300 or something. Whatever. I don't care. That laptop would be a plastic piece of shit with a terrible track pad that's twice as thick with half the battery life of the machine I'm running.
This computer is a tool that meets my need and does it better and more enjoyably than any other machines I've used. I fucking hate Windows (7 included) and Linux was always more work than I wanted to put into it (and ran it exclusively for 3 years before switching to a Mac).
(Incidentally, I don't know shit about cars. However, since I'm not a moron finding an honest mechanic in a day and age where shopping around and internet reviews are easy to come by is not exactly rocket science.)
My macbook runs OSX. Which means that beneath the covers it runs a variant of BSD linux.
it runs a variant of BSD linux.
BSD linux.
Get out. Turn in your geek card at the door, hang your head in shame and leave.
Pat yourself on the back for catching me forgetting to delete some text from my post before hitting submit. I typed both and googled which is under OSX so I could delete the incorrect one. Why did I have to google it? Why do I not just know that? Because practically speaking THE DIFFERENCES BETWEEN THE TWO ARE MINUSCULE. So you gotta rmdir instead of rm -rF. BFD.
blah blah blah
"Yes, Heaven forbid people know anything about their cars. Less knowledge! Thats what drives society forward!"
I hate to break this to every obnoxiously arrogant jackass on this site that thinks because they know how to fix their car or their radio or whatever else that they are somehow some elevated and enlightened individual that can look down their noses at others but here's a fucking news flash: there are tons of interesting and important subjects, disciplines and things that most people—even intelligent and well educated people—don't give two shits about and never want to have to deal with. Not ever.
For instance, I'll bet there are plenty of trauma surgeons out there that didn't know your fun fact. I bet people who have won Nobel prizes didn't know that. I bet if they found out they wouldn't be even slightly inclined to take a course on fucking auto repair.
I use a Mac and the computer isn't any more dumbed down than Windows or even some variants of Linux (which is what I used three years prior to switching to a Mac). It's certainly easier to use and more trouble free. However, it doesn't limit me in any way I care about. (Besides, it's like saying a manual transmission is "dumbed down" rather than "easier to use with less control, but since I use my car for commuting and not for racing the ease of use is more important than the performance.")
Mac discussions always bring out the most retarded this site has to offer (except for maybe global warming and/or anything about Republicans).
"Sure its 'liberating', but so is 'finding god'. What you call liberation, I call enslavement."
Seriously? This is what I'm talking about. Somehow someone being pleased with the ease of use of a computer has become akin to "enslavement." It was also, apparently, a fine opportunity to tie in your own religious spite at the same time, which of course is totally necessary in a discussion about a rumor about Apple incorporating a new I/O bus. That always makes me wax religious.
Some people want their stuff to just work. It doesn't make them stupid or ignorant or inferior or less enlightened. It doesn't even mean their somehow universally opposed to learning. I mean, come the fuck on, people have their disciplines and their interests. You sound like you'd be some asshole who'd get on a guy's case because he always ate out because he didn't care about learning to cook. There's nothing wrong with that. Do you get one people's cases for seeing doctors because they aren't experts on health? Do you hate power tools because people should learn how to properly use hand tools?
What the fuck is wrong with you people? Easier to use != dumbed down. Dumbed down != bad.
Dude, you're just digging yourself deeper. Hand in the card.
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