Thunderbolt is not a proprietary connector to Apple. It is a standard that Intel has made available and i've seen non-Apple computers with Thunderbolt.
And to add to this, Intel originally debuted Light Peak (see "Early Versions of Thunderbolt") with a USB connector, not the current connectors you see now. Unfortunately, the USB consortium said "Nope, you can't combine the two." So Intel re-released Light Peak as Thunderbolt with the new open standard.
Probably because they had USB-C in the pipe.
That would have been 5+ years before they even announced USB-C. Yeah, pretty speedy process.
Huh? USB 3.1 uses all four lanes for 10Gbps, but in alternate mode, it's allowing some other protocol to run over those lanes on the electrical level. There's nothing stopping you from running Thunderbolt 2 over a USB-C connector: it has enough lanes/pins to do that. There's even talk of VESA switching to USB-C as the main/official connector for DisplayPort.
Heck Sony has been using a USB-A port for Thunderbolt 4 years ago.
So just like Thunderbolt you can plug in a single USB hub and have everything connected - monitors, networking, flash drives etc. That's what Apple are doing now. You can also charge your laptop with the same cable, which you can't do with Thunderbolt.
Yes. And that's a brand new feature of USB 3.1, and Apple is the first to actually use it. While they have been using Thunderbolt for 4 years now.
Gee, you sure wish they would have waited 4 years for USB to catch up.
First, it's effectively PCIe - that should already start brewing ideas. Instead of crappy USB-to-serial adapters or parallel adapters that barely work, a Thunderbolt variant would work just like a real connector on your PC (and is practically driverless).
Thunderbolt also has the uncanny ability to hook up huge daisy chains of drives without losing too much speed between the first and last drive - most of the loss in speed comes from having more devices on the line than the actual order of them. If you want to deal with big ass external arrays, Thunderbolt makes that all the more convenient.
While all this is true, back in the day we heard the same sorts of arguments about Firewire being awesome for disk arrays, daisy chaining and video camcorders, and it never really gained any traction against USB, and instead flickered out.
Sure. But it was used for exactly these things, for which USB is still useless.
If you look at benchmarks for most purposes USB 3.0 connected drives perform as well as Thunderbolt connected ones. Outside of server applications the advantages of USB/Dockport far outweigh the few percent more performance, and the huge security risk of having a Thunderbolt port on your laptop.
Sure. Unless you run into the usual problems with crappy cables especially those more than 2 feet long.. Which is nothing compared to the problems with crappy USB 3 hubs.
Still, you can contrast with DockPort, which is a *VESA* standard.
It's 1 year old and used by nobody. Wooot for VESA! Fuck yeah, who wouldn't want a standard like that? Heck, for fun I searched on Amazon: the only thing you can buy there are controller chips.
Is this another "Apple needs to use this standard (because else nobody will)" post?
Who wants a watch that only works with an iPhone? If you don't like the iPhone 7 will you really ditch your $1k smart watch just so you can switch to a better phone?
Or you will keep your old iPhone for a year longer. This isn't an Android phone that obsoletes every 30 seconds, when a new Android phone comes out.
,
"We donâ(TM)t need all those other ports, Apple says. We are living in a wireless world now, where we can connect most of our peripherals without cords."
That statement alone should give some clue as to how out of touch Apple are with reality.
I'm reminded of that every time I have to haul around an external optical drive for another enlightened Mac user.
Let me guess: you still buy all Mac software on DVD? Just so you can justify buying that external drive?
There hasn't been a "Macbook" (without Air or Pro) for about 4 years.
If anything, the new Macbook is actually the new Macbook Air, because it is just like the original Air was to the Macbook back then. Apple simply didn't pull some renaming shenanigans just to make that clear to everyone.
If it were a real watch (moving parts style), at $10000 they would wear it the rest of their lives and pass it on to an heir.
Why would somebody buy such a cheap watch let alone bequeath it to a loved one? $10k is peanuts for a mechanical watch, let alone a gold one, you wouldn't give one to your gardener.
And Ethernet is virtually extinct for laptops these days
Agreed. On a consumer aimed laptop or ultra portable: sure. On a mac book pro? Not having one is idiotic. Especially given the performance differential between a busy wifi network and gigabit Ethernet.
The real problem is that RJ-45 is much too big for a notebook over an inch thick - the weird solutions I've seen on non-Apple notebooks speak volumes. Solutions nobody would accept on an Apple product.
The summary is written as if human co2 emissions are the ONLY thing that influence climate change.
No, it's written like it's the only thing significantly influencing climate change. Care to name any other significant influences (preferably anything not also man-made - and no, methane produced by intensive animal farming is also man-made).
up to 20 degrees higher than today at the northernmost latitudes... the global sea level was about 25 meters higher
I bet some inland Canadians/Scandinavian countries wouldn't mind, and they're not the only ones. There's lots of money to be made by letting climate change create havoc: insurance companies get more business when there's uncertainty; uncertainty gives speculators more volatility to work with; defense contractors have more food riots to quell; politicians get to make more promises to solve the new problems; and corporations get more grants, bailouts and subsidies to help solve them. First-world politicians get to use FUD to gain a bit more control over the populace, and the harsher climates help them avoid that dreaded post-scarcity economy just a little bit longer. Break enough windows and people won't be able to buy a society that no longer 'needs' the robber barons and demagogues.
So your point is that the evil cabal out to control the world is going to win either way, and doing nothing will make it cheaper for those who live now?
"if it turns out the science was right."
Yes, there has been generous funding for decades for those claiming they can predict the effects (good or bad) of pumping CO2 into the atmosphere. When is it time to hold them to a prediction to prove their worth?
Considering they didn't predict for most of the bad effects to happen by now, why should we? Holy fuck, the only people constantly predicting immediate doom are the denialists who insist that even burning a few gallons of oil less would tank the economy in no time.
"Daily Caller"? Okay, sure, lets ignore that for "greening" you also need more water and nutrients and go from the denialist distractoid to the real point: his "report" (which is more like a workplace safety bulletin) has nothing to do with plants, which you would have noticed if you had even carefully read what he wrote ("Some individuals" - only a dolt would think he's talking about plants).
So remind me why I even bother explaining this to you? You don't want any facts. You hate facts.
Hey, you know what didn't cause the Pliocene extinction event? High global temperatures.
Know what hasn't caused any extinction event in the history of the world? High global temperatures.
Global warming is a great thing - just ask Canada, especially the places that are currently -40 degrees.
As opposed to those near freezing - at the Arctic Circle? There is a reason why "Global" is capitalized. Here's a nice world map how temperatures where compared to the average for Jan. 2015: http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/global/
Final thought... comparisons are to rebuilding today's infrastructure as if it wasn't constantly changing already. We have decades and perhaps centuries to adjust - ever hear of constant improvement?
We are decades behind fixing our infrastructure already - do you really want to drag that out even longer?
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Thunderbolt is not a proprietary connector to Apple. It is a standard that Intel has made available and i've seen non-Apple computers with Thunderbolt.
And to add to this, Intel originally debuted Light Peak (see "Early Versions of Thunderbolt") with a USB connector, not the current connectors you see now. Unfortunately, the USB consortium said "Nope, you can't combine the two." So Intel re-released Light Peak as Thunderbolt with the new open standard.
Probably because they had USB-C in the pipe.
That would have been 5+ years before they even announced USB-C. Yeah, pretty speedy process.
Huh? USB 3.1 uses all four lanes for 10Gbps, but in alternate mode, it's allowing some other protocol to run over those lanes on the electrical level. There's nothing stopping you from running Thunderbolt 2 over a USB-C connector: it has enough lanes/pins to do that. There's even talk of VESA switching to USB-C as the main/official connector for DisplayPort.
Heck Sony has been using a USB-A port for Thunderbolt 4 years ago.
So just like Thunderbolt you can plug in a single USB hub and have everything connected - monitors, networking, flash drives etc. That's what Apple are doing now. You can also charge your laptop with the same cable, which you can't do with Thunderbolt.
Yes. And that's a brand new feature of USB 3.1, and Apple is the first to actually use it. While they have been using Thunderbolt for 4 years now.
Gee, you sure wish they would have waited 4 years for USB to catch up.
While all this is true, back in the day we heard the same sorts of arguments about Firewire being awesome for disk arrays, daisy chaining and video camcorders, and it never really gained any traction against USB, and instead flickered out.
Sure. But it was used for exactly these things, for which USB is still useless.
If you look at benchmarks for most purposes USB 3.0 connected drives perform as well as Thunderbolt connected ones. Outside of server applications the advantages of USB/Dockport far outweigh the few percent more performance, and the huge security risk of having a Thunderbolt port on your laptop.
Sure. Unless you run into the usual problems with crappy cables especially those more than 2 feet long.. Which is nothing compared to the problems with crappy USB 3 hubs.
Still, you can contrast with DockPort, which is a *VESA* standard.
It's 1 year old and used by nobody. Wooot for VESA! Fuck yeah, who wouldn't want a standard like that? Heck, for fun I searched on Amazon: the only thing you can buy there are controller chips.
Is this another "Apple needs to use this standard (because else nobody will)" post?
Who wants a watch that only works with an iPhone? If you don't like the iPhone 7 will you really ditch your $1k smart watch just so you can switch to a better phone?
Or you will keep your old iPhone for a year longer. This isn't an Android phone that obsoletes every 30 seconds, when a new Android phone comes out. ,
"We donâ(TM)t need all those other ports, Apple says. We are living in a wireless world now, where we can connect most of our peripherals without cords."
That statement alone should give some clue as to how out of touch Apple are with reality.
I'm reminded of that every time I have to haul around an external optical drive for another enlightened Mac user.
Let me guess: you still buy all Mac software on DVD? Just so you can justify buying that external drive?
Back in the day Apple was about bringing computers to the masses, and simplifying them to make them accessible.
Back in the old days, Apple din't sell remotely as many computers as they do today. And that's only counting Macs, not iPads or iPhones.
Almost all the people I've met with Macbooks
There hasn't been a "Macbook" (without Air or Pro) for about 4 years.
If anything, the new Macbook is actually the new Macbook Air, because it is just like the original Air was to the Macbook back then. Apple simply didn't pull some renaming shenanigans just to make that clear to everyone.
Please explain what will be obsolete about it.
If it were a real watch (moving parts style), at $10000 they would wear it the rest of their lives and pass it on to an heir.
Why would somebody buy such a cheap watch let alone bequeath it to a loved one? $10k is peanuts for a mechanical watch, let alone a gold one, you wouldn't give one to your gardener.
Unless you wanted more people to buy your products.
http://appleinsider.com/articl...
You really needed to dig out an article over a year old to "prove" your point? Pretty desperate - even more so than usual.
Protip: When trying to troll, you can't go full retard.
Always works for you ...
And Ethernet is virtually extinct for laptops these days
Agreed. On a consumer aimed laptop or ultra portable: sure. On a mac book pro? Not having one is idiotic. Especially given the performance differential between a busy wifi network and gigabit Ethernet.
The real problem is that RJ-45 is much too big for a notebook over an inch thick - the weird solutions I've seen on non-Apple notebooks speak volumes. Solutions nobody would accept on an Apple product.
The summary is written as if human co2 emissions are the ONLY thing that influence climate change.
No, it's written like it's the only thing significantly influencing climate change. Care to name any other significant influences (preferably anything not also man-made - and no, methane produced by intensive animal farming is also man-made).
The CO2 levels on the earth just 100,000 years ago are 3x what they are now
Errm, sure about that?
up to 20 degrees higher than today at the northernmost latitudes... the global sea level was about 25 meters higher
I bet some inland Canadians/Scandinavian countries wouldn't mind, and they're not the only ones. There's lots of money to be made by letting climate change create havoc: insurance companies get more business when there's uncertainty; uncertainty gives speculators more volatility to work with; defense contractors have more food riots to quell; politicians get to make more promises to solve the new problems; and corporations get more grants, bailouts and subsidies to help solve them. First-world politicians get to use FUD to gain a bit more control over the populace, and the harsher climates help them avoid that dreaded post-scarcity economy just a little bit longer. Break enough windows and people won't be able to buy a society that no longer 'needs' the robber barons and demagogues.
So your point is that the evil cabal out to control the world is going to win either way, and doing nothing will make it cheaper for those who live now?
"if it turns out the science was right." Yes, there has been generous funding for decades for those claiming they can predict the effects (good or bad) of pumping CO2 into the atmosphere. When is it time to hold them to a prediction to prove their worth?
Considering they didn't predict for most of the bad effects to happen by now, why should we? Holy fuck, the only people constantly predicting immediate doom are the denialists who insist that even burning a few gallons of oil less would tank the economy in no time.
... I call BS on your report. Increased CO2 emissions are actually greening the planet.
"Daily Caller"? Okay, sure, lets ignore that for "greening" you also need more water and nutrients and go from the denialist distractoid to the real point: his "report" (which is more like a workplace safety bulletin) has nothing to do with plants, which you would have noticed if you had even carefully read what he wrote ("Some individuals" - only a dolt would think he's talking about plants).
So remind me why I even bother explaining this to you? You don't want any facts. You hate facts.
Hey, you know what didn't cause the Pliocene extinction event? High global temperatures. Know what hasn't caused any extinction event in the history of the world? High global temperatures.
You know what you are? Wrong. http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/275/1630/47.full / http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paleocene%E2%80%93Eocene_Thermal_Maximum
Adolf McInhofe ring a bell, Nazi scum?
Yeah, people should all live in cabins in the wood, lest they be controlled.
Global warming is a great thing - just ask Canada, especially the places that are currently -40 degrees.
As opposed to those near freezing - at the Arctic Circle? There is a reason why "Global" is capitalized. Here's a nice world map how temperatures where compared to the average for Jan. 2015: http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/global/
Final thought... comparisons are to rebuilding today's infrastructure as if it wasn't constantly changing already. We have decades and perhaps centuries to adjust - ever hear of constant improvement?
We are decades behind fixing our infrastructure already - do you really want to drag that out even longer?
The story is about denialists not being able to handle facts. Stop proving it.