

Thunderbolt connector
Apple shows off its '11 MacBook Pro notebooks






Apple further describes ThunderBolt:





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RE: Thunderbolt
By Shadowself on 2/24/2011 3:13:16 PM , Rating: 2
So I take it you were adamantly against Apple when they dropped Apple proprietary interconnects (Apple Desktop Bus) and old, slow serial busses (RS-232 and RS-422) when they launched the iMac and only supported USB? Apple was "forcing" people to move to a newer, more universal interconnect system. From what you are saying that was an evil thing to have done. RS-232 was everywhere, RS-422 was common, for Apple users Apple Desktop Bus was the "standard". It has taken a long time for the world to move to a USB standard. Hell, you can still buy brand new motherboards today that support the old keyboard/mouse interconnects! So Apple moving to USB in the late '90s was truly a bad thing to do.

Lightpeak (aka Thunderbolt in Apple parlance) supports the USB 3 protocol over the Lightpeak physical media.

RE: Thunderbolt
By omnicronx on 2/24/2011 5:11:09 PM , Rating: 2
How is any of this rant Apples to Apples..

I don't see how anyone can argue that replacing multiple interconnects with a single standard is a bad thing. That said this is clearly not a fair comparison to what is being discussed.

LightPeak can't replace USB for everything, so its not going away. Merely making it a legacy connection and not attempting to improve upon it when it is the industry standard for pretty much anything is incomprehensible in my opinion.

Of course I'm making predictions here, Apple could very well implement USB3 in which all of what I said is a non issue. Its my opinion that LightPeak should complement USB3, not replace it. (and from what I've gathered, this seems to be Intel's position as well.)

I just have a bad feeling Apple won't follow this path, heck if it were up to Apple we would all be using firewire instead of USB. Alas USB became the standard and Apple had little choice but to implement it. Seems eerily similar, don't you think?

As I said, technologies such as LightPath are the future, but USB3 is the present and cannot be ignored.


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