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 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
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.
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.
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.