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Apple To Unveil Light Peak, New MacBook Pros This Week?
An anonymous reader writes "Apple will reportedly soon make an announcement regarding a new high-speed connection technology. And as luck would have it, this comes hot on the heels of a report that Apple will release a slew of new MacBook Pros later this week. For some time now, reports have abounded detailing Apple and Intel's cooperation on a new transfer technology dubbed Light Peak capable of transferring data at 10GB/s both up and down. Could this find its way into Apple's new lineup of MacBook Pros as has been previously rumored?"
From what I've read it's not fast enough to replace HDMI/Displayport and not as cheap to integrate as USB 3.0 (will Apple retain a royalty on the connector ala Firewire?) I do understand the need to have a universal, optical interconnect but I'm not so sure i want Apple being the one pushing it...
The new connection tech is called Light Peak. The summary has it right; the title has it wrong.
The article makes claims that Intel "Is delaying" USB 3.0 "until 2010" to help Light Peak get off the ground.
Problem 1: It's 2011. You can't be "delaying something until 2010" in 2011...
Problem 2: USB 3.0 is deployed already. So they clearly can't be delaying it.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
You misspelled Firewire
MacBook Air comes with Flash storage. Apple has said it themselves they are moving in that direction where SSDs would become the norm.
Presumably you can plug it into something much faster. When I was video editing on my old G4 PowerBook, I plugged in a couple of 7200RPM drives on a FireWire 800 chain. This was much faster than the local disk - I used one for scratch renders and one for the project. The external disks could each handle about 30MB/s, back when my internal drive couldn't hit 10MB/s, and FW800 was fast enough for both disks to be running that the same time.
These days, you could easily plug in some external SSDs, and hit an order of magnitude or so higher transfer rate. I'd also be quite surprised if Apple introduced new MacBook Pros without making internal SSDs standard across the entire line (as they did with the MacBook Air already), in which case the internal disk is much less likely to be a bottleneck for anything.
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Light Peak isn't really a port standard like USB or Firewire, it's a consolidator. You can run USB over Light Peak, same with Firewire, HDMI, Audio, Networking, etc. The goal with Light Peak is to connect two cords to your laptop (power and Light Peak) and have everything connected to the other end of Light Peak (Monitor, USB keyboard/mouse, Firewire drive, Ethernet, etc), making it much less cluttered around your laptop and enabling you to pick it up and go fairly quickly. This really shows off in smaller devices, take a Netbook or a Tablet, instead of needing all that space and hardware for USB, and the like you can simply route it over Light Peak and have one connector take care of it all.
Since this is an Intel standard (albeit sponsored and pushed by Apple) it doesn't come with the restrictions that Apple would have placed on it if it were their own standard. This should be fairly open and available. I bet within a year, two at most, nearly all laptops will have this port, and there will be expansion cards available for PC's to add the port. That is, unless it's a total flop, which is possible.
DEMETRIUS: Villain, what hast thou done?
AARON: Villain, I have done thy mother.
Shakespeare invents 'your mom'
10G[B]/s or 10G[b]/s? Wikipedia says 10Gb/s.
Hey, I enjoy a good Apple troll now and then, but Light Peak (not Light Speed, Light Peak) appears to be the future and the successor to USB. USB 3 isn't exactly taking off, with even Intel eschewing it in its chipsets. Light Peak is billed as a replacement for many connection standards such as "SCSI, SATA, USB, FireWire, PCI Express and HDMI" Light Peak is Intel's new baby, and as with many computing technology advancements Apple likes to be ahead of the pack (especially when it comes to bus connections). will be backward compatible (even appearing to use the same physical connector as USB) and adaptable in a way that will allow it to replace a number of different connection types. It will be adopted by the other motherboard producers because, well, it seems like there's no competition against it as the future bus technology. Now were you trolling just to troll, or are you really so ignorant about the emerging technology that you'd post a comment like that in seriousness? If your comment wasn't meant in jest, why not get yourself some free education on the subject.
Part of the hardcore faithful who believed in Apple long before it was cool again to do so
Microsoft has announced Ludicrous Speed!
Maybe not even that - they'll possibly have power & light peak in one cable: http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/11/02/20/apple_to_announce_new_high_speed_connector_for_macs_report_claims.html
Sometimes data isn't intended to be written to a disk.
Do you save-to-disk every YouTube video you watch?
"Lame" - Galaxar
>>>What's the use of this high speed
Uncompressed video which requires ~3 Gbit/s to stream 60fps 1080p.
Information wants to be expensive AND wants to be free. So you have Value vs. Cheap distribution fighting each other.
The pro/cons aside, Light Peak is an Intel invention. Secondly, from what I read this is an interconnect on the board level. From the consumer's perspective they will still use their USB, SATA cables or whatever. The MB manufacturers are the ones affected.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
To be fair, Apple wasn't the first to use USB. They were the first to drop their legacy ports like ADC, printer, etc. for only two kinds of ports. USB for low bandwidth like keyboard and mice and FireWire for high bandwidth like portable HDs and digital video cameras. To this day, some PC MBs still come with connectors that are rarely used.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
The idea is to encapsulate a number of digital protocols (nothing unique to Light Peak, Displayport in theory supports ethernet and usb packets in addition to audio and video data, for example.
You will need something to convert it to analog, and that will remain a niche market with high prices as a result. You won't get a magical RCA out from this.
I also doubt you can't replace the display portion of your churches setup with something that would accept both displayport *and* RCA in (not requiring replacing cameras and other equipment). I also don't know why *your* current laptop must be the technology everything else revolves around in this configuration
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
But you can run audio, video, ethernet, and USB over displayport and displayport has 20 Gb/s.
I don't understand why do a new tech when a standard already exists with twice the bandwidth and an eye for encapsulating other common needs.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Intel is doing something I don't like... Let's all boycott Apple!!!!!
Are you going to boycott Intel chips too? That's a lot harder than you think...
As some others are pointing out, this is not about moving data to/from the internal hard drive. It's about accessing data quickly, and consolidating connectors.
I just got a new display for my laptop so I have a bigger screen when I'm at home. When I get home, I plug in:
- power
- left usb
- ext speakers
- dvi
- right usb
- ethernet
- firewire
That's a LOT of stuff to mess with every time I dock/undock. I'd LOVE it if they'd change the magsafe so the center (data) pin was a full duplex optical connector that could make one thin cable break out ALL of that stuff I have to plug in one at a time now. It may not cover all of those angles, but I'm hoping it does. It's possible.
Also there's a connector wear issue. full size DVI cables aren't the best thing to have to be constantly plugging/unplugging. Ethernet cables break their clips. USB starts to go in upside-down. Ext speakers fit nicely in the mic port. And none of them is really built for a very high number of operations like the magport is.
As for speed, imagine much faster access to external storage - a nice RAID5 hooked to your laptop via lightpeak, for editing video, where the speed limitation is your cpu, your ram amount/speed, and your storage. Laptops as you point out have speed issues with internal storage, between 5400-7200 usually, so external storage is a better choice. Natively best you can do is firewire800, 79mb/sec. (the other faster option is getting an esata expresscard, I have one, they can be 150mb/sec+) But imagine 250mb/sec+ lightpeak access speeds for video editing, no card required. *drool*
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
Apple wasn't the first to put USB on computers.
Apple was the first to give users NO OTHER OPTION.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Cable length
USB wasn't a standard option at the time of windows 98. Indeed it wasn't until winXP that you could use a USB keyboard easily, as the built in BIOS wouldn't use USB keyboards for setup.
Apple doesn't pioneer a lot of things. apple is usually the first to bring them to the mass market intelligently.
Also USB support in windows 98 sucked. you needed to install drivers for everything but mice and keyboards.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
I remember it differently from you. Yes, Win98 had USB but I hardly remember a push from MS for everyone to use it. It was going to be adopted as the next standard but no one was in a rush to adopt it. From my perspective everyone had written Apple off as dead in 1998. When they released their iMac, then some opinions began to change. Since Apple dropped their legacy ports, the only way to connect was with USB or FireWire. If you were going to make peripherals for Mac or for Mac and PC, you had to start adopting USB. Of course some companies would not adopt it for years but to simplify the manufacturing and offer customers the most options, USB was the way to go.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Before the Sandy Bridge bug forced a recall, Intel SB boards shipped with USB 3 ports on them.
Now what they may be talking about is that USB 3 isn't part of the current Intel chipsets, you have to add a chip on the board to get it. Ok well that is a different issue, and has nothing to do with trying to hold it back and everything to do with design and implementation time.
Please remember USB is Intel's spec. If they wanted to "hold USB 3 back" or something they could just not release it. They just aren't integrating it in to their chipsets yet, it'll be integrated in future chipsets.
Same deal with Light Peak I imagine. It isn't in the current P67 chipsets so it'll have to be an addon chip. I'm sure it'll get integrated in to the chipsets later.
Are you saying that, instead of my laptop currently having several USB ports, there would just be one LightPeak port on the laptop, which would connect to all of the USB devices? How would that work?
This is complete and total bullshit. Apple has promoted open standards FOR YEARS. Webkit? Apple's (yes I know it was built off of khtml). CUPS? Apple owns and maintains it. HTML5 vs. flash? Apple supports the open standard. Firewire? Apple was one of the few major players to support it. USB? Apple helped drive the wide-spread adoption of USB by forcing its use with the imacs.
The bottom line is that if you think Apple doesn't support open standards, you're either a troll or badly misinformed. It could be you're thinking of another major industry player who likes to buy off standards committees.
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As opposed to the legacy technology that's still in use by every other company?
Tell me, how is that Microsoft PlaysForSure?
You mean like the mini-Displayport - a port they standardised and has been rolled into the displayport standard, that is also royalty free?
All of the ports on the back of a Mac are standard - USB, Firewire, Mini-displayport, ethernet, 3.5mm hybrid toslink/analog audio, SD card reader (some machines)...
Sorry, what "trendy white gold latched cable that I can only use with one computer" are you talking about? None of my cables that are hooked up to my Mac are from Apple, except the power cord and that's a standard IEC "kettle lead" too.
I'm pretty tired of Slashdot allowing any twat to plagiarise a story, (in this case from CNET at http://news.cnet.com/8301-13924_3-20033940-64.html )and screw up a few facts (eg, they confuse Gigabits with Gigabytes; only out by a factor of 8), submit it "anonymously" and then drive traffic to their crummy site.
Um, isn't that the definition of innovation? Company A invents a product; prices are naturally higher because of the cost of innovation, branding, and because the company markets itself as a premium products. As soon as the ink is dry on the new idea, everyone else does it, just as you said, a year or two later.
Firewire? Apple was one of the few major players to support it.
They didn't just support it. From what I remember, Firewire (the original Firewire 400) was actually invented by Apple. And it was open for everyone to use. The only thing restrictive about Firewire which Apple might be guilty of is their ownership of the logo for it.
That's what she said...
No, no, no. You connect your lightPeak to a hub, or to your monitor, and then run your USB/FW/DP cables from that hub to everything else. For a desktop, it's almost useless, as the octopus now originates from your monitor, or perhaps a hub near your monitor. You still need the regular ports on your PC so that you can have a small octopus from your external HD, camera, network, etc coming from the computer for things that run right off the main box.
The real (only?) advantage I see is that this could become a docking port connector to replace the (limited) port replicators and unique-by-laptop-series docking station connections.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
I have family AV library on a Mac Mini server (with a couple 1GB drives hanging off it by Firewire). It can stream 3 different movies (to Mac laptops/iMac) simultaneously via wireless without stuttering so that works for around the house. What I'd like to see is iTunes (on my server) able to stream over 3G to iPhone/iPads the way EyeTV can. That would be sweet!
I drank what? -- Socrates
Which forced device manufacturers to support the new standard and led to USB adoption throughout the rest of the industry.
CNet appears to have snarfed this from AppleInsider.com, and augmented by reading the Intel web site on LightPeak. I'm normally inclined to agree with your complaint, but in this case it's not clear that you've traced the story back to it's origination.
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.
Nope they where not standard... they where usua, but connectors etc could be different from device to device even though they implemented the same protocols etc.
USB is closer to a standard, and Firewire is an standard, governed by IEEE. OpenCL is a Standard that Apple initiated but is governed now by Khronos Group.
In that sense Googles WebM is not a standard but MPEG 4 is which has h.264 and is governed by ISO/IEC. h.264 even has an ISO number.
So while some tote Apples webkit as an Standard it's not a standard, but its an open platform.
And to the one trolling about usb in PC back in 1996. Yeah there was some PCs who had USB ports but far from all. Even less there where no peripherals using USB then. The Apple iMac propelled USB market. And nearly every USB peripheral that came out then had matching color for each iMac color.
~99.5% of all USB peripherals back then where designed for the Macs. Especially the iMacs.
I remember the times when the using iomega Zip disk on a PC, slow as HD diskette. On the mac almost as fast as the internal hard drive, plug n play even.
If Light Peak can form a network between machines - imagine a Beowulf cluster using it!
One that hath name thou can not otter
The only thing restrictive about Firewire which Apple might be guilty of is their ownership of the logo for it.
Not true.
Some recent Shuffle with lockout of unauthorized headset controls?
To what are you refering? If you're referring to the iLounge article, you should do your homework. Despite the hysteria of the iLounge article, Ars Technica found that there is no authentication in the headsets. iPod Shuffle 3rd generation headset have to have the controls built-in to the headsets but there is no DRM chip. At least two 3rd parties in the article confirmed that they had headsets available and that they didn't require authentication but merely a change in design from other headsets.
Lack of access to those players via file system or MTP?
I think you're confusing a method and a requirement. See the requirement is that you needed to sync up your music on your computer with the player. It used to be necessary that you needed file access to move your files onto your PMP player as few had syncing software that worked well. The method was required. If you still want to be able to do that, then that's your choice. It's not a requirement these days.
One-off DRM? (no, it isn't gone - look at, say, e-books; or generally "one appstore to rule them all")
I don't think you quite understand how content systems work. See the content provider whether it is music company or a book publisher gets to decide whether they want DRM. If Apple or MS or whoever wants to be able to sell their content, they have to negotiate with the content provider. Amazon was able to get DRM-free music because the music companies realized too late that their insistence on DRM only made Apple more powerful; however, if you remember correctly Apple offered DRM free music before Amazon as EMI had allowed them to sell it although at a slightly higher price. The other music companies did not agree until about a year later. If you have a problem with DRM, I suggest you have a talk with the content providers.
They don't appear to have much of a very clear position when it comes to promoting open standards... just when it seems practical to them, I guess.
And how is that different from any other company?
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
DisplayPort
Bandwidth - 1.62, 2.7, or 5.4 Gbit/s data rate per lane; 1, 2, or 4 lanes; (effective total 5.184, 8.64, or 17.28 Gbit/s for 4-lane link); 1 Mbit/s or 720 Mbit/s for the auxiliary channel.
Light Peak
Bandwidth - 10 Gbit/s (demonstrated), 100 Gbit/s (claimed by 2020)
SIG FAULT: Post index out of bounds.
yes few play MPEG4, but MPEG4 contains a lot of formats. AAC is MPEG4p3. h.264 is MPEG4p10.
And why don't just eat your own words search for ipod in text you'll find out.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Efficiency_Advanced_Audio_Coding
PS. iTunes Music is DRM free and been so for quite a while.