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iMac Gets Thunderbolt I/O, Quad-core
fergus07 writes "Apple's desktop lineup has typically pushed users requiring plenty of fast I/O towards the Mac Pro — but the latest iMac refresh has broken the tradition. Quad-core Sandy Bridge CPUs and faster ATI Radeon HD GPUs are welcomed, but it's the addition of Thunderbolt ports (one in the 21.5-inch and two in the 27-inch) that really ups the ante for a number of professional users."
Maybe a future version of the iMac will even have Blu-Ray.
For those (like me) that had no idea what Thunderbolt is, apparently it is the new name for what was formerly known as Light Peak.
Great news for those wanting to install Snow Leopard on their Sandy Bridge machines. It was imperfect early on (involving setting busratio flags amongst others) but now that MacOS is officially supported on the 2nd generation Cores it should make for a smoother Hackintosh experience.
Mind you, the fact it's taken Apple four months to catch up isn't impressive. If hobbyists could run it on day one of the new chips being released, I don't see why Apple couldn't have prepared for it sooner...
I'm glad to see Apple rolling out Thunderbolt to their whole lineup and not restricting it to the high end. Anything they can do to promote this and get it mainstream for all computers will be a benefit to the industry and end users. Tangles of cords, switching cords, and unchainable unintelligent standards have been hampering us for too long. No, I don't want to have to have a computer in between my video camera and my high capacity storage drive. No, I don't want to have more than one cable between my monitor and computer and yes I want to plug USB devices, microphones, hard drives, etc. to the device on top of my desk instead of climbing under it. The throughput and flexibility here has been needed for a long time. Come on industry, full speed ahead with this one!
USB uptake on PCs was a function of Intel bundling USB for free on all of it's motherboards. The fact that Apple Corp left it's legacy users in the lurch really had nothing to do with it.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
I'm pretty sure that H.264 is todays most common high definition video format, not BluRay, and I'm pretty sure that there is a significant proportion of the population getting along fine without BD-ROM functionality.
Not saying it wouldn't be a nice-to-have, but its far from required. Infact, in any of the PCs I have built or bought in the past three years, not once did a thought occur to me to even consider BluRay as a capability to include.
Apple don't give a damn about BluRay, they have iTunes - thats the direction they want you to go in....
Look everybody! He's beating a dead horse! Look at those twitching legs go!
> What do you need PCIe slots for in this time and age
$10 upgrade vs. a $2000 upgrade.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
I guess PCIe slots are better for powering your in-case chaser LEDs, liquid intercooler and cup holder, while still giving you ample on-host full power USB ports to power your coffee warmer, Arduino-based 3D milling machine and Dr. Who talking Dalek commemorative snow globe.
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
students steal their movies, and apple knows this. no blu-ray necessary.
"They were pure niggers." – Noam Chomsky
Watching a movie in better quality. Getting the alternate audio tracks. Getting the subtitle tracks. Having access to something that isn't being streamed by Netflix yet because it is too new.
There are plenty of reasons to not restrict yourself to the Apple view of the world.
Most people simply aren't a member of the cult and will be doing things contrary to all of the silly remarks made by fanboys.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
I know not reading TFA is par for the course on slashdot, but if you managed to read the summary - all two lines of it - you might have discovered the following hint that these are not laptops: (one in the 21.5-inch and two in the 27-inch)
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
USB uptake on PCs was a function of Intel bundling USB for free on all of it's motherboards. The fact that Apple Corp left it's legacy users in the lurch really had nothing to do with it.
Which is why for several years there all USB devices shipped only in bondi blue to match the look of the iMac? Sorry, but Apple basically created the mainstream USB peripheral market before the PC market caught up and started using them as well.
I happen to like my TI99/4A...very much actually.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
USB uptake on PCs was a function of Intel bundling USB for free on all of it's motherboards. The fact that Apple Corp left it's legacy users in the lurch really had nothing to do with it.
Sure it did. When Apple released their iMac there was a rush to release peripherals to support them. Before that nobody really cared about USB despite the fact that it was present on the majority of PCs. People were fine with serial and parallel ports - there was simply insufficient reasons to switch to USB. Remember that USB 1.0 (or 1.1) was not actually that fast and came with a pile of driver issues (due to how new it was). It also added to the work that the CPU was required to do, something that is irrelevant today but quite relevant for a p200.
So Apple did jumpstart the USB market. Not that it would not have happened eventually on it's own, Apple just made it happen sooner. Their actions caused peripheral manufacturers to adopt the standard sooner then they would have liked to. Remember those early devices? Most were standard serial/parallel devices with a built in USB to serial/parallel converter. Ugly, but necessary if they wanted a piece of the iMac peripheral market.
Blu-ray is a method of distribution, H.264 is a video codec. Most blu-ray releases actually use H.264 as a codec. Furthermore, nobody is stopping you from buying a USB blu-ray disk. Regarding the integrated drive, while on the laptops it's not feasible because there are no 9.5mm slot loading SATA blu-ray drives, on the iMac and (possibly) on the mac mini you can upgrade to blu-ray because you can fit a 12.7mm drive in them.
UNIX was not designed to stop you from doing stupid things, because that would also stop you from doing clever ones.
Anon. Coward writes:
>>>ATSC? what a pile of garbage, and MPEG-2?! COME ON! At least the EU got h.264 from the start
h.264 aka MPEG4 didn't exist when ATSC was finalized in 1996 and broadcasts started in 97. They used the best codec available at the time of development.
Could have been worse. The Japanese version of HDTV was developed in the early 80s and isn't digital at all. It's an analog format called MUSE which occupies 3 channels to send one single program. - The US could have easily been stuck with that same format, if the FCC had followed Reagan's directive to copy it.
As for the other issues, "overscan" was developed because everyone was still using CRTs in the 90s. The mid-90s engineers had no idea that flat screen LCDs would be able to display a viewable picture. (Back then most lcds were crap.) And 1080i is based off the original japanese standard.
My AC stalker: " I personally agree with your posts most of the time, but that won't keep me from modding you troll"
Tell her to click on the 'refurbished' link on the Apple store. She'll probably find the 24" model for 25% less than it was a week ago.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
If she went to an Apple store "recently", she most certainly didn't decide she wanted a 24", as they haven't sold one new since early 2009.
Revisionist history? I thought Apple was very, very anti-USB and pro-firewire? Heck the first iPod didn't even interface to USB (and therefore couldn't talk to anything but macs). That's how anti-USB apple was initially.
My AC stalker: " I personally agree with your posts most of the time, but that won't keep me from modding you troll"
So If want to to upgrade the video card. maybe Maybe I want to run a Quadro for CAD. Maybe in the future there will some strange box like external video cards that used Thunderbolt but not now. Or maybe I want a RAID for storage?
Not a big deal:
If twelve PCIe bus connectors aren't enough for you, then chances are your desired "tower Mac" isn't going to be enough for you either. Not even the Mac Pro comes with 12 PCIe slots.
Yaz.
Revisionist history? I thought Apple was very, very anti-USB and pro-firewire? Heck the first iPod didn't even interface to USB (and therefore couldn't talk to anything but macs). That's how anti-USB apple was initially.
No, not revisionist history at all. Apple was never anti-USB for the types of low speed devices USB 1 was originally designed to handle. Firewire was for significantly higher bandwidth applications of the type USB wasn't originally designed for.
This would be why Apple never released a Firewire mouse or keyboard. You have to recall when USB was originally introduced, it's fastest speed was only 1.5Mbps -- it wasn't until USB 1.1 that "high speed" mode was introduced, running at 12Mbps. Firewire 1 on the other hand, was 400Mbps -- or about 33 times faster. Where USB 1 was painful for external storage, Firewire flew.
This was the situation Apple faced when the iPod 1 was released (which, I should point out, was a Mac-only device at the time, as iTunes hadn't been ported to Windows yet, and the formatted file system out of the box was HFS). They had a choice between slow USB 1 (USB 2 was standardized at the end of 2001. The iPod 1 was released in October 2001, so at the time the iPod 1 was released, virtually all USB ports on consumer machines ran at a maximum of 12Mbps), or fast Firewire 1.
So it was purely about speed -- a device that could store up to 10GB of data (iPod 2's, released in July 2002, could store up to 20GB) needed something faster than 12Mbps. By the time USB 2 become more ubiquitous, Apple released the iPod 3 (April 2003) with USB sync support.
None of which indicates anything about being anti-USB; USB simply wasn't up to the task when the first two generations of iPod were released, whereas Firewire was.
Yaz.
Lots of people really don't care about blue ray. I have no plans to own it, nor do most people I know. It's a niche market and will most likely stay that way.
Caveat Utilitor
To add to all the above, thunderbolt allows bus power at 10W. Compared to USB2 (2.5W maximum), and USB3, (4.5W max), this is a big improvement (eSata doesn't even supply power without the eSATAp connector, which isn't fully adopted). Thunderbolt will natively fast-charge an iPad (when Apple releases a tbolt connector or hub) and many other such devices.
Of course, the bus power situation on firewire was much better (30V x 1.5A = 15W), but alas, we'll have to do with 10W, as Apple migrates everyone over from their "failed" standard FW to TB (which won't make the same royalty mistake that FW did).
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So it's a new laptop with some pretty unremarkable new features.
You clearly didn't read the article or even know what an iMac is (hint: desktop). You can choose to ignore Apple stories by using Slashdot's account preferences, but instead choose to spam us with your ignorance.
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Funny, I thought that Blu-Ray was just a delivery method. You mean without Blu-Ray, you can't produce a high-def video and, say, upload it to Youtube, or Facebook, or Vimeo or any of the literally dozens of other file-sharing services out there for your family to watch/download from?
I think you've confused "content production" and "content delivery". The macs may lack a single kind of content delivery mechanism out of the box - Blu Ray drives. That does not mean it's impossible - or even marginally more difficult - to produce a high def video and send it to your family. In fact, with online services, you don't have the additional lag of burning and shipping/delivering a disc.
ThunderBolt is really got potential but there is only one Thunderbolt port on these machines.
You really need to read. The 27 inch iMac has TWO T-Bolt ports.
Really you are just a stupid freaking brain dead wannabe Apple fanboi.
So, since you have already displayed your ignorance, I guess really you are just... stupid.
I can only count to 31 on one hand. 58 laptops with bluray drives at Newegg
Oh but it makes *all* the difference. It doesn't change the product, but it does show everyone that you didn't actually read TFA, TFS or TFHeadline before rushing in your excitement to post a redundant comment.
It will certainly help to weight your comments on future articles.
Actually my google search was "8Gbit FC to Thunderbolt" which didn't yield the 4Gbit adapters. So there is connectivity, only at 1/2 the current speed (unless there is a 8Gbit one I missed).
I can't help it that you didn't specify the additional condition until AFTER I pointed out your deficient search-skills.
And not everyone needs an FC to SAN connection that can transfer the equivalent of a non-compressed movie in a few seconds. Just because the first-generation Thunderbolt chipsets aren't as fast as a 16x PCIe slot, doesn't mean there isn't a ton of utility in what is coming in this first generation of products.
At 10 Gbps, the bandwidth is theoretically there; so there is no obvious reason that an 8 Gbps Thunderbolt FC interface can't happen.
...because what everyone wants is a TI/99A or Atari 400 approach to how systems look and are upgraded.
Apple users spend all of this time "looking trendy" and denigrating anything else that they view as ugly while promoting this 80s notion of how computers are put together.
Excuse me? I think you have that completely backwards.
Is there anything MORE "80s" than a tower computer with a bunch of cards in slots?
Well, the iMac is the best-selling PC of all time, and its adoption of things like USB helped the standard take off. Since it's got Thunderbolt and Quad-core Intel on a consumer model, we should expect to see other PC makers try to catch up to them. That's why it's news.
The only thing that exclusivity deals accomplish is to limit consumer choice and allow competitors the opportunity to get ahead (see: the iPhone.) From a marketing standpoint limiting Thunderbolt to Apple increases the value of the Mac, when in reality it chokes off the 3rd party ecosystem, and makes the port into a mostly useless esoteric novelty. Like Firewire-800.
Not really. Legacy style peripherals were still quite commonplace after this mythical event by Apple allegedly banished them all.
No. The real reason for manufacturers to embrace USB was when Microsoft finally caught up with Intel and started supporting all of those USB controllers that were already out there in everyone's PCs. It was only at that time that a greater that 3% of the market actually cared about any of those "bondi blue" USB devices.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.