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Why Thunderbolt Is Dead In the Water
adeelarshad82 writes "In the same way that Apple championed FireWire for the replacement of parallel SCSI, Thunderbolt is meant as the next big thing in video and audio peripheral interfaces. Plus, it's Apple's move to beat USB 3.0. However, Thunderbolt is off to a slow start, for a number of reasons — from cost to the technology's features in comparison to USB 3.0 — which is why it may be dead in the water."
Sigh
New technology is expensive and uncommon a couple months after release. News at 11.
The first thought when I read that was "... is this a P-47 or something?"
Is it possible this thing's major failing is that few people have heard of it? (ignoring that if it comes from Apple, it's probably a proprietary standard with licensing fees to match...)
Thunderbolt will be the next USB, the next standard.
The title and the summary seem to be in disagreement. How do i know which to trust?
Let's not turn all the world into a pro wrestling match...
Apple built Thunderbolt with Intel, not against them. If it was only about fighting USB, they wouldn't team up.
It seems these days any new technology which Slashdot takes a dislike to goes on to enjoy huge success. Take for example the iPad, Facebook, Twitter... I am almost tempted to predict that Thunderbolt will be a huge success :)
The article reads like a big Apple bash, even though Thunderbolt is Intel's tech. The points about cost are probably valid but the whole thing comes off as a big unsourced bitchfest.
I never saw anyone expect it to get common quickly...
From the article " Thunderbolt hardware, we've been told, cost no less than $90"
Ouch.
People have been saying this since the beginning of Apple. If you're going to bash Apple, you are going to have to try harder.
Sig: I stole this sig.
Apple tech is too expensive. Other tech is cheaper and almost as good.
Hurrr.... You just made the case for why Apple products have a price premium.
Trolling is a art,
But this is Intel tech, not Apple.
If you think theres no compelling difference between the CPU-bound USB 3.0 and what is essentially an external PCIe connector, you need to go back and do some more research. LightPeak /Thunderbolt is just plain better than USB3.0; downsides do include lack of backwards compatibility, and that may prove to be its biggest obstacle, but to argue that "USB3.0 is good enough" is just wrong.
As for price, USB3.0 has been out for about a year now, with Thunderbolt only having rolled off the shelves-- and this, only in Apples computers so far-- a few months ago. Right now, on newegg, im only seeing USB3.0 on highend multi-hundred-dollar motherboards, so it seems to be a wash in that regard.
Its way too early to tell, and anyone saying otherwise is full of it.
Are you kidding me? First thing is, USB 3.0 isn't that popular right now either. And Thunderbolt is so much better than USB 3.0 that it's not even funny. It's much faster than USB 3.0. You can have any protocol on Thunderbolt, it's not just for external hard drives.
So what's so special about USB 3.0 anyway? The same stupid connector that isn't keyed and that you always have to try twice to connect it?
I doubt Apple really wants to undercut USB. As someone above pointed out, if that was truly the case, Apple and Intel wouldn't be partners for Thunderbolt. You can easily predict, though, that Thunderbolt will become the preferred / default connection for iOS hardware, and probably no shortage of specialty devices for those willing to pay. Can't say for sure, of course, but "dead in the water" is clearly premature if not wholly misguided, given the broader outlook.
It's always confirmation bias!
A standard which I can currently only plugin to an Apple computer but not PCs? DOA.
Portable HDDs are supposed to be portable. Part of portability is working on multiple platforms. Until Intel gets their PC release in line it's only going to be used by those who know they'll only ever want their data on a Mac.
In the same way that Apple championed FireWire for the replacement of parallel SCSI
Hmm... I've been in the datacenter a LONG time... and a photographer even longer. I don't recall many devices in the datacenter replacing their parallel SCSI with firewire, and I don't recall many cameras/camcorders using parallel SCSI and transitioning into firewire.
...they shall pick the standard. as always.
An utterly useless article information wise, and a little too over the top to be considered a fine example of hater bait. I know you're not the brightest bunch, but surely you can do better than this, eds.
--
People have been saying this since the beginning of Apple. If you're going to bash Apple, you are going to have to try harder.
Sorry, I thought this was Slashdot. Since when does bashing Apple on slashdot require anything except repeating the same criticism over again?
*sigh*
Let me try again. Apple tech is proprietary, other tech is open. Apple tech is but a ploy to lock users into standards nobody else will use, and foster dependence on Apple to prevent unhappy users from switching to cheaper tech.
Intel did. Intel designed and developed the tech, and Apple just came to them and said "Hey, here's some ideas for the final implementation, and we'd like to put it in our devices soon." It is an Intel technology, and one in development for quite awhile.
It is targeted at something of a different market from USB3. It is more expensive for devices to implement, and less secure, since it is really just an external PCIe port. However that means full DMA, low latency and so on.
They are complimentary technologies.
...with USB providing a wide range of functionality and compatibility and Thunderbolt providing extremely high bandwidth for certain applications like audio interfaces and digital audio workstation.
a zillion usb devices already available, work with usb, even if not at full speed
almost nothing works on thunderbolt
same thing happened with firewire, although at least cameras are using it
thunderbolt and usb are both techs of intel so there isnt a lot of real competition anyway. the advantage of thunderbolt being that you can use it like a pci express lane.
yeah - but. by the time there's enough devices that make sense, usb4 might be around (just like usb "killed" fw)
where are the data only Thunderbolt cards?
How Will Thunderbolt tie in to desktop video cards?
Thunderbolt needs to get into more systems and Pci-e x4 cards will help that big time.
As for video I don't see ATI / nvidia putting pci-e switches + Thunderbolt chips on there video cards so will there be voodoo 1 like loop back cables to tie the chipset or on MB TB chip to the DP bus or will desktops just have build in data only TB ports?
Will the new mac pro go to on board video chips / MXM slots for video?
There, happy now?
No sig? Sigh...
I have neither the time nor the inclination to research this, but I'm sure someone said the same thing in the early days of USB.
We'll see if "rumors of its death are premature". I am just happy we are moving towards a faster local I/O standard and applaud Apple for having the guts to champion the technology it thinks is best.
Thunderbolt is tied to the old DisplayPort v1.1.
DisplayPort v1.2 is faster.
yeah, this seems like a pretty ignorant post. Thunderbolt is not Apple (It's almost entirely Intel). It's not them trying to undermine USB3 (which is also largely Intel). And new tech is always slow to start. Who writes this crap?
Thunderbolt looks like a very useful technology. Unfortunately it will add several dollars to the cost of the PC, so probably only Macs will support it, so it'll be hard to find good, cheap monitors etc., and ultimately it will fail. Unless the PC manufacturers decide to grow a pair and do something useful for a change. The PC industry seems committed to the worst possible technologies that people will buy.
What does "shot themselves in the foot" even mean in this context? Is it not "cool" enough for you or something?
Thunderbolt? Really?
Thunderbolt can only hope to achieve the same market as Firewire (i.e. less than 1% of Wintel users).
What is this magic that they would have been able to do with fiber?
Ever worked with it? For a consumer connector it sucks. It's delicate, futzy about cleanliness, and really not much gain over copper. Hell, without huge waste and high expense it can't even carry power.
I don't know about you, but I purchased a lot of expensive gear to explicitly inhibit the propagation of Thunderbolt to my PCs.
Even more dangerous is allowing Thunderbolt to connect to my PCs directly from the cloud (hence, the newly installed lightning rod).
I have neither the time nor the inclination to research this, but I'm sure someone said the same thing in the early days of USB
Funny you should say that: USB ports were dead in the water for a while - these funny oblong sockets showed up on PC motherboards but Windows didn't support them, PCs still had RS232 and Centronics ports, scanners still came with SCSI cards and so nobody used USB much.
Then someone bought out a popular all-in-one computer that only had USB, and (by some strange coincidence) USB printers, keyboards, mice etc. started to become available. Who was this brave company? Hint: the first wave of mass-market USB peripherals all tended to have translucent blue plastic cases reminiscent of the original "Bondai Blue" iMac...
In a survey of 100 programmers, 111111 thought that duck-typing was a good idea.
Thunderbolt ports work with standard DVI monitors; you just need a mini-displayport to DVI adapter. Monoprice has them for cheap (no affiliation, just a satisfied customer).
The proprietary vs open argument mostly only holds water with (other) nerds.
SIG FAULT: Post index out of bounds.
What of this analysis doesn't apply to initial use of USB 1.0 on the original iMac? I'm not saying that Thunderbolt will succeed, just wondering what the evidence is that Firewire and not USB 1.0 is the right parallel.
Thunderbolt is dead because of eSATA (better for hard drives). Some will argue that Thunderbolt is faster than SATA. They just forget that your Thunderbolt hard drive will have a SATA to Thunderbold bridge. Oh yes, and it will of course be 25% more expensive. But at least it will be Apple-certified.
But it also carries display port!
So what? Do you want to unplug your external hard drive when you plug your display? No? How many Thunderbolt ports do you have on your Macbook again? 1? That's what I thought.
And do you want to pay $30 for an adapter that you will always forget at home when you need it just to plug that projector?
Thunderbolt will be as much as success as Firewire 800. There is nothing wrong with it. It just won't get major acceptance in the market. And like firewire 800, 95% of Mac users having it will never use it. They will still be proud because they have the fastest port out there.
Yeah, you didn't use the word Beleaguered even once.
I drank what? -- Socrates
Wrong. It's about value. If USB3 provides 75% of the value of LightPeak at 50% of the cost, that's a economic win.
You're treating technoloy like a religion, as though purity, superiority, and elegance have intrinsic value. They don't.
If you don't know where you are going, you will wind up somewhere else.
You haven't been paying attention. The "tech geeks" in the families of "non-tech savvy consumers" have been telling them for a few years now, "sell it on eBay and buy a Mac." Thunderbolt will do fine, even if only Mac users get to connect their iPad 3 or iPhone 5 to it and get Thunderbolt 10 Gbps transfer speeds. They won't care what all y'all are doing, and won't be interested in how long it takes you to sync your iPad. "You know how long it takes? Mine is so quick, I never thought about it."
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.
FireWire isn't dead, yet. I use it to migrate from one Mac to another about once a year, and to connect hard drives. USB is sorta like gruel. You could eat it. But I've got whole modern cuisines, why would I give that up?
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.
Of course, my next migration will be via Thunderbolt.
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.
Do your research. They're still looking onto optics. Copper was just simpler to implement. When they get the optics side done, it's expected to increase the bandwidth of the technology by a factor of 10 (10Gb/s to 100Gb/s)
SIG FAULT: Post index out of bounds.
As Thunderbolt is basically an external PCIe x4 port + DisplayPort, the article basically says that USB is better than PCIe. That doesn't make any sense. Thunderbolt will enable a few things that might be extremely useful, like docking stations that are not tied to a specific laptop model, external GPUs and lots of other things.
On the desktop - mass storage side of things, I always found USB 1 and 2 somewhat sucky, with compatibility issues (I had to force some ports to USB1 for some of my supposedly USB2 gadgets to work at all), so-so real throughput, and high CPU usage with some chipsets. FW never had any of those issues, but was indeed more expensive especially on the peripheral side, and less prevalent. I'm already having problems with USB3, so I'm guessing the situation could very well repeat itself, with TB being more reliable, somewhat faster, and more efficient, but more expensive and not ubiquitous.
But, I think the crux of the matter is that TB can be that lone connector on our shiny smartphones and tablets; while USB3 can't. TB can do it all: video, mass storage, LAN, keyboard, mouse, sound, in theory even GPU...and USB... **all at the same time**, and with minimal interfacing upheaval. USB can't do most of that, let alone simultaneously. I really hope 2 years from now, my phone and tablet will have TB, and I'll be able to buy, and re-use, cheap standard TB docks for them.
The Cloud - because you don't care if your apps and data are up in the air.
If that scenario pans out (and the recent HP blathering about why they are not interested in Thunderbolt provides some evidence that it might) then you'll see Apple's share of the consumer market growing even faster over the next couple years, when Mac users are loading their iPad with movies to take on the plane in about 90 seconds, and HP users are spending a non trivial part of an hour to do the same.
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.
Thunderbolt is NOT intended as a replacement for USB. Yeah, USB3 is supposed to be fast and sexy and all those superlatives, but the reality is that USB has always taken a while to mature, due to shoddy controlers and host-based processing. Thunderbolt is closer in spirit to Firewire, which, contrary to common belief, is still very much alive and kicking in the pro multimedia segment. Firewire video, firewire audio, firewire storage. It's still the hotness, and it will be a very long time before the bargain-basement USB3 with its batallion of corner-cutting taiwanese supporters even catches up to FW800.
Would it have been cooler if Thunderbolt were backward-compatible with USB2 and/or 3 ? Cooler, yes, but it would have enticed manufacturers to limit the number of ports due to cost, or have a half-assed setup where some ports are Thunderbolt, and others are just plain USB hanging off some slaved controller.
The way it is now, I can look forward to new, faster audio/video/storage gadgets that will benefit from the 10gbps interlink. Heck I want to look into designing a fat RAID enclosure that connects via Thunderbolt - it would beat the crap out of point-to-point FC, at a much lower price point, and the daisy chaining feature implies easy expandability. Need more storage ? Chain another RAID box, no need for a wider HBA or port multipliers. That right there is worth five figures to a ton of my clients.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
USB has way too many cable end types. I hate that.
HDMI has both regular and mini size
DisplayPort has both regular and mini size
At least Thunderbolt is promising to have just 1 size and it supports mini display port as well. I wish we could have one cable type with the exact same cable connector ends for video, hard drives, network, sound, and peripherals (mice, keyboard, webcams, etc).
There seems to be a misunderstanding of what thunderbolt is.
It is not a competitor with USB, Firewire, Displayport. It is more of an umbrella technology that can deliver each of these peripheral technologies and others over one cable.
Thunderbolt is an external PCI Express connector. If you want to use a PCI Express connector to plug in a mouse or external HD, you might be able to in the near future, but thats not the intent. I doubt many people will be buying Thunderbolt HD's in the near future (beyond high speed raid systems) even if the
The most imminent Thunderbolt products are monitors that are more like laptop docks. A single cable between your computer and your monitor, where you monitor can have its own graphics card, usb, firewire, eSATA...
Go ahead, buy your USB, Firewire, eSATA hardware. One day you might be connecting them all to you computer though a thunderbolt dock.
Also with thunderbolt the number of port types on laptops could be reduced to 3.
1. Power
2. USB 2.0 (keyboard, mouse or other)
3. Thunderbolt (monitor, ethernet, USB 3.0, Firewire, eSATA, PCI, everything else)
What is this magic that they would have been able to do with fiber?
Ever worked with it? For a consumer connector it sucks. It's delicate, futzy about cleanliness, and really not much gain over copper. Hell, without huge waste and high expense it can't even carry power.
The "magic" is that current electrical cabling is reaching the limits of speed and cable length, something Light Peak would have been able to circumvent if they hadn't moved it onto a copper-based solution. It had a theoretical throughput of up to 100Gbps when it was based on fiber tech. That means you could have, theoretically, transferred a Blu-ray movie in as fast as 3 seconds. With file size continually increasing, this is the direction that peripheral connections should be moving in.
Also, as someone who works with Fiber every day, it is not has brittle as it used to be. And there is also fiber now that can bend and be handled close to what Ethernet could handle (sure you can't pinch it in your fingers and squeeze with all your might, but only an ass would do that), although it is more expensive. And while standard fiber connectors such as LC or SC are "fussy" about cleanliness, it usually isn't a huge issue unless it is really dirty, and the connector for an end user on a tech like LightPeak would have kept that in mind and not had the raw connector exposed like on standard fiber cables.
"I hope you know how very lucky you are to know me, because I am so incredibly incredible."
I believe Apple got a one year exclusive on the technology too. On the plus side, you might see some actual LightPeak /Thunderbolt video cards that replace the mobile chipset they stuffed into the last set of iMacs. The downside is no action on the PC side for at least a year. Video cards will suffer for it, as historically the Mac uses older cards than the serious gamers cards. Still looking forward to having the option to do something more (ala loopback connector) with a laptop.
I'm starting to see USB3 devices getting more common. My new Asus Transformer tablet uses a USB3 cable. Plugged into a USB2 slot on my laptop, takes forever to charge. Using the extra pins with the wall wart, it charges very quickly. Not sure if Asus cheated and re-purposed the pins or if the new spec provides that much more power.
What does "shot themselves in the foot" even mean in this context? Is it not "cool" enough for you or something?
No. I mean they created what is essentially another proprietary copper-based connector where there wasn't a need for one. Hence why nobody is picking it up. What is the purpose of this tech when USB 3.0 just came out? Exactly, there is none. It even costs more than USB 3.0 (about $2 a controller vs. more than $10 fir ThunderBolt). Nobody is going to use Thunderbolt on a USB 3.0 equipped mobo. Also, in the past when Intel had created standardized connectors (such as pioneering USB, SATA, etc), it created standards bodies and licensed it's designs royalty-free, and built coalitions before moving forward. There are no such standards bodies or coalitions for Thunderbolt and no 3rd party chip. Details of the protocol are still under tight wraps. Which can only suggest they intend to keep it as a proprietary connector.
"I hope you know how very lucky you are to know me, because I am so incredibly incredible."
Thunderbolt is designed more to replace eSATA and FireWire than USB.
Neither one of which has taken the world by storm... Frankly we don't really need a replacement for either of those. They're fine but niche. There is more to having a successful interface than transfer rates. Cost to manufacture, legacy hardware compatibility, current equipment needs, licensing terms, customer demand and more all play a role. The opportunity for Thunderbolt is if it can combine the video (usually VGA/DVI/HDMI) and peripheral ports (usually USB) into a single interface. USB replaces several types of cables but it isn't quite capable enough to replace dedicated video cables. It's not clear that USB3 will be fast enough either. If Thunderbolt is cheap enough to manufacture and has a performance advantage that lets people further reduce the number of different cables they need, then it will have a chance.
What is wanted is something that is fast, cheap, compatible, reliable, easy to configure and minimizes the number of different cables we need. Frankly most PCs should ideally have no more than two cable types - one high power cable to power the device (when needed) and one type of data cable that can also handle low voltage DC power needs. Nothing wrong with using specialized cables for specific performance needs but that doesn't apply to most of us most of the time. I don't really care if the data cable is USB, Firewire, Thunderbolt or something else entirely but there is a lot to be gained by standardizing on a suitable general purpose data cable. USB comes closest to this ideal right now. (Yes Firewire could do the job but it's too expensive and lost that battle with USB long ago) Perhaps Thunderbolt will take it the next step. Only time will tell.
The fiber optic version isn't dead, it wasn't low enough in price quite yet to implement. The fiber optic version will likely come about, hopefully using a better name than ThunderBolt (I personally prefer the LightPeak name). I'm assuming that non-optic ThunderBolt owners will end up be SOL or have to buy a 'ThunderBolt to LightPeak' transceiver to use old equipment.
Intel has already talked about future of LightPeak (before it become ThunderBolt) reaching 20Gbps, 50Gbps and even 100Gbps channels.
Apple was committed to the technology from the start as they were helping drive the development of it. But I'm sure Intel will implement it in their chipsets eventually, hopefully when they do they will go directly to the Optic version.
Regardless eventually optic connections are going to start happening, it is just a matter of when.
thunderbolt is only pci-e x4 so why put E-net on it when just about all boards have E-net in the chipset or on it's own pci-e x1 bus?
TFA says the hardware is ~$90, compared to ~$3 for USB, so I don't think this is correct.
I don't know what the real numbers are but I'd expect Thunderbolt to be more expensive for some time simply due to economies of scale. There is a LOT of USB equipment out there, lots of people who can make it, and the equipment to make USB connections is long since depreciated so the fixed costs (development, capital equipment, etc) have been significantly/fully amortized. It will take a while for Thunderbolt to get to the same point even if it does catch on big. USB isn't about to go away any time soon. It's too cheap and too ubiquitous.
I hope Thunderbolt dies a quick death. Just as FireWire, it makes your machine vulnerable to DMA attacks by external devices for no good reason.
ycombinator discussion
Thunderbolt: A new way to hack Macs
Will desktop video cards have thunderbolt ports?
or will you have on board video + thunderbolt ports on the MB with your display on the DVI / HDMI / display port's on the video card?
Will you be able to use unused pci-e slots / lines for Thunderbolt cards to add more Thunderbolt buses?
Will systems have 2 Thunderbolt ports X8 pci-e split to 2 X4 for TB and the other X8 pci-e for the video card? Or will intel make Thunderbolt more in the chipset and give video the full X16?
I've been wondering this, and maybe someone here knows the answer. I think a big part of why USB is successful is because of the standard "profiles", which all OSes have drivers for. If every Mass Storage device is going to need manufacturer drivers, that headache seems like it would kill this standard. Since it is essentially PCIe, I would think this would be true. Anyone know for sure?
Does this mean I can quit waiting for Apple to upgrade the MacBook Air and just pick one up?
The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell
Thunderbolt has support for lightpeak cables anyway. The switch to optical and back is done in the cables. Sure that makes for a pricey cable, but this solves all those dirt issues. 100Gbps is not yet in the reach of the consumer gear. I have a 10GbE network at work, for my house 1GbE is still fine.
USB has support for bulk data transfers which can be performed just fine using DMA. It's just that DMA is performed by the USB controller, not by device itself.
USB is kinda cool in that regard, it completely separates logical data delivery and processing from physical implementation. You can work with your device using simple polling-style bitbanging or you can use a dedicated controller which can offload data transfer from CPU[s].
FireWire, on the other hand, assumes that device can work directly with the host's RAM. It has a few advantages, for example, it's possible to make dumb devices without microcontrollers in FireWire.
Nikon may be implementing Thundermug on the next generation of professional cameras. The pro cameras at Nikon are 14-bit, and 24 megapixels. Assuming that they go for 32/24/36 MP (the generally understood maximum for the image size available out of35mm negative), and say 16-bit, the current USB 2 connectors would be as slow as an Alabama prison guard's when reading the editorial page.
Would the consumer cameras ever get ThunderPort? Probably never.
USB can be used with DMA just fine. You just need to do it in your USB controller chips - where it rightfully belongs in any case.
Run by a pretentious turtleneck-wearing little Caesar selling over-priced i7 and Xeon yuppie boxes. Ahh...now I want to mug a mac-ower.
Professionals don't care about wide availability, price points and so on they want performance at any price. Users of Logic Studio and Final Cut will welcome anything that is faster than Firewire.
USB3 is the same old cheap half baked serial bus technology, it requires more CPU intervention than Firewire and Thunderbolt.
I go to the Microcenter. On the shelves I see portable drives with usb3.0 connectors, especiall the mobile drives. I'd say half if not more of the models now have USB3.0 compatibility. I don't see anything lightpeak. Of course I never go to the apple corner.
I see a netbook, the Asus 1215B E350 version has a usb3 port. I'd rather use a USB3.0 port over an esata port any day, especially with USB powered drives.
Is USB 3.0 suitable for connecting 1080p 3D-enabled TV? I know earlier USB hardware had trouble with excessive host CPU use and thus realtime performance guarantees apart from theoretical bandwidth limits. If not, the author is missing the point, which is to have a single connector for ALL devices. As for optical, I don't see any reason to use more expensive controllers and cables if Intel was able to achieve their target bandwidth with cooper.
This is OK by me, if Apple will stick with LightPeak/Thunderbolt for at least as long as they've stuck with FireWire. I don't want to buy a bunch of devices that are obsolete in 2-3 years, but I can still use my FireWire 400 drives from 10 years ago, along with my FireWire 800 drives from this year. Who cares if Thunderbolt doesn't wipe USB3 off the face of the earth? It's cool, it' works well, and as long as it isn't forcefully obsoleted, I will be happy with it for years to come.
I'd say Apple won't care; the port will be seen as a useful feature that is unique to Macs (or at least most heavily used in Macs). Intel probably doesn't mind if Thunderbolt stays a Mac niche thing either, as they are making money off Thunderbolt and USB3 both. No matter which way the hardware makers go, Intel is making sales and/or collecting royalties.
So what's the big deal here? Does every new connector type have to become a universal standard to be considered a success? If you want a drive that will work on Mac/Win/Linux, get USB.
:q!
Ethernet ports are definitely nice on laptops, but with wifi the are not essential, especially when trying to limit the size and number of different ports.
An extra thunderbolt port with an ethernet adapter may be more useful than a single function ethernet port on a laptop since whenever you may want to plug into an ethernet port, you also would likely be at a desk where you could plug in all your other items through a thunderbolt dock connector.
More multi use ports are better than fewer sole purpose ports on a laptop.
fixed ports are better then lots of Adapters that can cost up to $30-$100 and are easy to forget also you may need a hub as well.
And in this case, I am referring to the submission. Yikes. Hook, line and sinker...
Blu-Ray simply was so much better, held far more space, was in almost every way superior to HD-DVD. While Blu-Ray won the battle, er bribe, HD-DVD has the last laugh as its just not getting adopted the same way DVD did. I guess people didnt want to re-buy the same movie for the 3rd or 4th time. BluRay is cheap to buy now, but still, not many takers.
Thunderbolt might be better, but who wants to buy a new printer, web cam, or external hard drive, paying considerable more just to get mimimal perforance increase.
Seems to me that Apple needed to adopt Intel/PC technology just to stay alive, now that theyre sitting comfertable on a mountain of cash, I guess they can afford to go back to being proprietary and closed at the cost of its users.
I'm looking at my Dell GX960, cutting edge in December 2009 and still in production, with parallel and serial ports. I'm pretty sure the HP I just bought has them too, but could be wrong.
Never let a lack of data get in the way of a good rant.
People actually do get tired of upgrading technology at some point.
Yes, but those people are old and getting out of the market. The new young'uns will gladly adopt the new hotness, and laugh about your old RS232 and Centronix connectors! :) "Haha look at that old dinosaur - he's still using WIRES!!
Also, budgets generally cycle from tight to loose. Back in the day, I worked at a major electronics company. Their plan was - when going into a recession, start designing new high-end stuff, because it will be ready to go to market about the time that folks are ready to open their wallets again. Then when things are looking good for a while, design the new low-end stuff, to be ready for the next downturn. It worked pretty well in part because they had a long development cycle, but the timing can be adjusted accordingly.
It's easier to be a result of the past, but more fun to be a cause of the future! http://www.spacefinancegroup.com/
I get more bandwidth over my VGA cable - that is to say, upwards of about a foot the bandwidth is unlimited and purely dependent upon the DACs capability (what is it, about 400MHz for 2048x1536 over VGA?)
Even with a single connector, at 30 feet I can get a clean 2048x1536 signal at 85Hz. Is thunderbolt going to do that? What, it requires two links for something not even as high resolution or refresh rate on supposedly SUPERIOR technology? Oh well. Still using VGA then.
Better stick with hard drives and network cards for this tech, guys.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
Wrong. It's about value. If USB3 provides 75% of the value of LightPeak at 50% of the cost, that's a economic win.
Value assumes it has qualities fit for purposes, you have not defined what you consider fit for purpose for this use and so that argument on it's face means nothing. To some light peak could be utterly useless because of the reliance on the cpu and timing issues and so even at half the price it is like paying for a motorcycle wheel as opposed to the appropriate car one.
I see lights peak being used for purposes where usb3 would utterly, utterly fail
How some of your friends only buy Firewire external disks, your other group of friends buy the cheap USB ones. Those USB guys will never get it why you get the more expensive ones, no matter how you explain it to them, that you can daisy-chain them and they do not make your machine into a crawling piece of crap when you are copying something. They will buy USB 3 because some paper will explain a theoretical speed never achievable because of the lack of a dedicated controller.
N0 improvements 99.999 percent of used need or will see.
I currently use USB 3.0 and am chomping at the bit waiting for good Thunderbolt storage devices to appear - I do a lot of photography and as others have noted USB 3.0 is really not that much better than eSata. Thunderbolt is a clear step up.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Don't care about protocols, I just want an external notebook hard drive with my VMs that I can plug in without a wall socket or other extra cables. Would love to move to a faster bus, but very leery from past experience.
eSata is fail. USB2 is flaky, some drive/ports work pretty well, but a lot of ports don't provide enough power, seen plenty of Windows based notebooks fail, the drive will spin up but will not recognized, and even see some desktops where the back connectors work but front ones fail. The Firewire drives I have used work 100% on any Mac.
Absolutely. However, the people here who think that Thunderbolt is going to dominate peripheral interconnects are missing that point, I think. For the vast majority of interconnects, the things you mentioned are not an issue at all, and thus Thunderbolt offers literally nothing. Right? If I am buying a wheel, it would be silly for me to buy one rated up to 200 miles per hour, when I will only ever need to drive 85 mph, tops. Even if the 200 mph wheel is superior technology, more carefully crafted, has more thoughtful design, if I don't need the benefit it provides, then that has no value to me.
If you don't know where you are going, you will wind up somewhere else.
Although Firewire was technically far superior to USB, it failed for a variety of reasons that Apple is mostly not repeating.
It was Apple Vs. Intel. Apple developed Firewire, Intel designed USB. Intel was able to push its chip purchasers toward USB. This time Apple went to Intel and had them develop the standard.
Apple did not let other users use the Firewire name, causing fragmentation of the brand and thus a watered down marketing push (ie1394, iLink, Firewire).
Cost. Apple wanted a cut of every firewire port put on a device. USB was designed to be cheap to build, Firewire was designed to perform. Apple is not taking a cut at least, but have no idea how cost compares to USB3. This may be an issue.
Many people believe USB 3 is faster. Thunderbolt is twice as fast as USB3 x 2 channels, plus video in/out.
Dunno about you... but I want it.
The problem with that is people do buy in excess. Word processing and typesetting can still be effectively done on a 486 or other embedded class device and yet even purpose defined machines are typically some ghz behemoth monster. Why? for future uses. You don't buy a top of the line machine in order to keep up with the neighbours, you buy it for extra growing room for any capacity you may require that is not presently known.
While it is true usb3 exceeds capacity and will likely be useful for quite some time, at present implementations of it are cpu bound so thunderbolt is not only faster, but you can actually utilize that speed, with todays hardware. Should your needs change faster than cpus can adapt, it will prove useful.
For things like mouse/keyboard/other low end device usb will always win, but thunderbolt serves different needs, similar ones to what firewire serves just at a much higher rate. These needs do exist and people will pay for it if they require it. Only the people who see no utility in fast low latency transfers would not be interested and while there are quite a few I doubt there would be enough to doom the new connector, especially if it replaces hdmi and dvi as the dominant video connector on intel motherboards (since intel is pushing it).
Thunderbolt is a universal laptop dock. I've seen way too many laptop specific docks from HP, Dell and IBM/Lenovo in the work place. Upgrade your laptop, well that dock won't work, you get to buy a new one. I'm looking forward to seeing this tech end the vendor lock-in for laptop docking station.
Gosh, thunderbolt sounds just super fine. I'll go out and buy a Thunderbolt expansion card today! Oh, yeah, I CAN'T.
Second, it's entirely unclear to me why anyone supports USB 3 at all. For hard drives and similar, USB 3 offers no advantages over eSATA. For almost all other devices, USB 3 offers no advantages over USB 2. So ignoring portable devices that only have room for one port, USB 3 is a solution in search of a problem.
I'm guessing that you haven't used USB3 then? eSATAp is rarer than Thunderbolt, and a big benefit of USB3 is the additional power that is available to the connector. I've just installed a USB3 card into my desktop PC, and it requires a molex power feed to power the downstream devices. The backward compatibility of USB3 means that the new external drive I just bought will also work on my older computers. With the USB3 card on the desktop I am getting sustained 100MB/s transfers, which USB2 or FW400 won't achieve.
I think the multi-device thing that Thunderbolt offers and the ability to make external PCIe connections is fantastic too, but it is still early days. If Thunderbolt external drives are made that support USB or Firewire then great, but in the mean time you are limited in the devices that can use the protocol. USB3 is here now, with a lot more motherboard, laptop and external device support.
Power supply from a USB3 port is limited to 6 load units of 150mA, giving a port total of 900mA at 5V. This is an improvement over USB2 which was limited to 500mA. The eSATAp ports are generally eSATA/USB2 ports, and so there is less power available. The other problem with eSATAp is that there isn't an official standard. That's where USB3 wins out -- and the fact that I can buy USB3 stuff right now.
Bad troll!
Apple has not abandoned Firewire (it is still on the most recent iMacs that added Thunderbolt) and provided an upgrade path for when/if it does (Thunderbolt/Firewire adapters).
You are hereby evicted from you current premises. Begone by the break of day or we will send Billy Goat Gruff.
Democracy is a sheep and two wolves deciding what to have for lunch. Freedom is a well armed sheep contesting the issue
I have neither the time nor the inclination to research this, but I'm sure someone said the same thing in the early days of USB.
We'll see if "rumors of its death are premature". I am just happy we are moving towards a faster local I/O standard and applaud Apple for having the guts to champion the technology it thinks is best.
The funny thing is, USB replaced about six ports (PS2, RS232, LPT and others) whilst Thunderbolt does half of what USB does. The USB flash drive killed the floppy drive.
USB was cheap, simple and ubiquitous, it's also got a massive head start with the first USB ports appearing on PC's in 1996.
We'll see how far this technology goes. Intel developed this for LightPeak which is Optical (which competes with well established Fibre Channel in reality) but Thunderbolt is copper, that eliminates most of the advantages over USB and does nothing to combat the ubiquity of USB. So we'll see how far Thunderbolt actually gets.
Just another case of Apple trying to be innovating by ignoring how real people use their computers.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
USB 3.0 will be vastly more successful than Thunderbolt is, at least in its current specification. Whilst Thunderbolt is in itself great technology - just like FireWire was - it's not compatible with legacy USB devices and more importantly in time it will be replaced with an offering that is 10x the speed it is today (the 100Gb LightPeak interfaces).
The advantages of Thunderbolt over USB 3.0 are just not enough to be a game changer. LightPeak or even USB 4.0 should at this stage offer a 50x speed improvement over USB 3.0. So, when this arrives, and more importantly people actually need it, Thunderbolt will be another costly reminder of Apple offering an improved interface that never took off outside of Apple products. This may not be that big a deal in the scheme of things because Apple has traditionally offered quirky differentiators, rather than working on market dominance (if they wanted dominance they would license their software/hardware to third parties and not try to lock in the whole vertical themselves).
And you believe DMA is a good idea for an external device?
Never studied much computer security, I take it.
That is a complete non-starter for many deployments at large scale enterprises.
If anybody but Apple were pushing this,
Now you see the effect of reputation.
What's especially interesting is that Apple didn't invent it, Intel did. Apple simply is the first to implement it.
Likewise, Apple did not invent NuBus, MIT did; they simply chose to implement a 32 bit bus when PC's were standardized on the 8-bit ISA, PC's went from ISA -> [MCA|EISA] -> VESA -> PCI
Apple also drove the adoption of Sony's 3.5" floppy drive, though their particular incarnation with software controlled eject failed to catch on in the PC world (at the cost of how many corrupted files when inexperienced users failed to wait for the drive activity light to go out?
Yes, Apple developed and pushed Firewire/1394; though notably they did a lot to make it open and adopted, and they did try to encourage its adoption by not including USB on some Macs, but the reputation for aversion for "NIH" tech is a leftover from the 80's. Its been 20 years, get over it
Most people I talk to about why the buy i* products is user experience, especially considering that the previous generations of their phones weren't exactly keeping up hardware and capabilities wise (they've done a fine job at keeping up now, as they perceive there is now viable competition). Now we have the same crew that was chatting up UX fiercely behind TB yelling "OMFG 10GB/s TB > 4GB/s USB3 WTFLOL"
If Thunderbolt is as dead as Firewire, then I'm fine with that corpse. I've been backing up my hard drive with a FW800 peripheral for over 2 years without a problem and in a pretty speedy way. Besides, my USB ports are not jealous.
Why does it have to take the world by storm to be successful?
Depends on your definition of success. I don't see a whole lot of point to Thunderbolt unless it replaces some current cable type(s) and thereby reduces the types we need. We already have other data cables available that are plenty fast. I'm sure Thunderbolt will sell plenty with Apple and Intel backing it but if it achieves the same level of "success" as IEEE 1394 (Firewire), I'd consider that a failure. Few of us really need yet another type of data cable unless it does something our current cables do not. Nothing I've read about Thunderbolt is particularly interesting or novel except for its ability to combine what we presently (usually) use USB and video cables for.
All your talk about what the market wants isn't incorrect, you're just incorrect in assuming that Apple actually cares about replacing USB with this technology.
I didn't mention a single thing about Apple or their intentions. Frankly I don't really know or care what Apple does. I'm certain Apple would appreciate the elegance of using a single cable type but who knows what is being planned in the House of Jobs. Whatever happens will take years to achieve and will depend on more companies than Apple.
A lot of people consider Firewire a failure b/c USB is so standard, but Firewire achieved all the goals Apple set out for it.
Unless you work for Apple you cannot possibly know that. Furthermore, Apple was not the only backer of IEEE 1394 - Sony and Texas Instruments also released branded implementations of it and lots of PCs came with IEEE 1394 ports. As a general purpose data cable, Firewire (IEEE 1394) was a modest success and remains useful in niche applications to this day. Nevertheless, few people consider it a very successful interface when compared with the success of USB. A pity because I really like IEEE 1394 better than USB from a technical perspective - just not an economic one. They were too similar for both of them to become ubiquitous and USB turned out to be the one more widely adopted.