Slashdot Mirror
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?"
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
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.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
First, it's intel's tech, not apples. Second, apple's pushed alot of good tech forward, maybe it's just that i'm not a bigot, but who cares who's pushing it? Would you rather sony push it and rename it ilink2? I'm sure you wouldn't have a problem with Google pushing it? which makes your post, infuriating to me. Any company that brings it, even in a proprietary form will spur on innovation. I didn't hear anything about DLNA until Apple started pushing airplay. The rise of android can be easily traced to apple's iphone, and a very worried verizon wireless. it's good for us all, ffs.
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'
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
Gentlemen! You can't fight in here, this is the war room!
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.
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.
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?
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
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.