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Belkin Upgrades Thunderbolt Express Dock with USB 3.0 and eSATA, Bumps Price to $399.99
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The good thing is that PC vendors are starting to work on TB. This means that we will see TB-enabled devices of all sorts and prices falling fast. It's not quite clear if this will help Mac users for Apple is known for doing weird things that prevent its customers from using affordable 3rd party solutions.
Considering the new Macbooks releasing in a few days might have USB3.0 and the usual Ethernet, FW800, Thunderbolt. The only thing they got going on this is eSata which I might add is buggy as hell for portable enclosures. Good luck, too late.
Really, you can daisy chain USB3 and eSATA? Didn't think so. Not to mention the throughput on USB 3 is half of Thunderbolt, and I can't put a display at the end of a nonexistent USB 3.0 chain. I've heard similar arguments and accusations made against Blu-Ray, you just aren't seeing the long game.
Nope, they're going after the market and people like me who can afford to and are happy to pay premiums for high end, new technology that benefits customers like me.
I get what everyone's saying about the pricing being silly for the average consumer, but maybe they thought if they were going to make something most people wouldn't buy because it was too expensive, they might as well go nuts with it, add more stuff and make it even pricier so it's an even better proposition for the smaller group of people who really want/need it and weren't concerned with the price tag in the first place. There's a strange but understandable kind of logic to that really.
Edit: Like Movicutter says above, exactly.
Edit: Like Movicutter says above, exactly.
£350 (including the cable, converted from $ and VAT added) is a ridiculous amount of money for the item. I'd find the extra £600 for the cinema display.
If the Thunderbolt Display has fixed many of its original issues, I would save a few hundred more dollars and spring for that as a docking station. It would include a beautiful screen as well!
Who cares that you can't daisy-chain USB 3? Here's a 7-port USB 3.0 hub for $49. Hubs are superior too, since you can disconnect one device without breaking the chain. For <$20, you can get eSATA->USB3.0 adapters. If the new MBP has USB3.0, it will be way cheaper for the average user to get the speed they need without paying $450+
I've seen people throwing around that "bag of hurt" phrase - that's what he called Blu-Ray, right? I've never really used BR and don't really intend to, but it's a bit silly to reject the media format that the industry is accepting and then go with a new, expensive format like Thunderbolt, instead of going with the rest of the industry. I like Apple for its "Think Different" attitude but at the same time this thunderbolt idea seems to be really, really stupid.
Yes, I want faster transfer speeds, but not out of the ballpark speeds for out of the ballpark prices. I think this is really just a case of technology that is so powerful and only really ideal for certain industries but not necessarily consumers.
On the other hand, I'm not surprised Belkin's expecting this much. It's a new standard and they don't start off cheap. The people who are suggesting it should be $100 need to actually think about this, they're probably comparing it to USB and Firewire, which have been around for years. Naturally it will take time for the industry to actually properly start using Thunderbolt but I don't think that will be any time soon considering its overkill for a lot of people.
Seriously, USB 3.0 should have come first to the Mac, not Thunderbolt.
Yes, I want faster transfer speeds, but not out of the ballpark speeds for out of the ballpark prices. I think this is really just a case of technology that is so powerful and only really ideal for certain industries but not necessarily consumers.
On the other hand, I'm not surprised Belkin's expecting this much. It's a new standard and they don't start off cheap. The people who are suggesting it should be $100 need to actually think about this, they're probably comparing it to USB and Firewire, which have been around for years. Naturally it will take time for the industry to actually properly start using Thunderbolt but I don't think that will be any time soon considering its overkill for a lot of people.
Seriously, USB 3.0 should have come first to the Mac, not Thunderbolt.
By the time this Belkin device is shipping the Mac mini likely has USB 3. And you could use the optical drive of the Mac mini (at least one could with FW target mode, not sure about TB target mode). And since every Mac can serve as a router (with its Internet sharing feature), it should be conceivable to enable Ethernet via TB (it is possible in principle over FW). And the mini can be a file server and thus could serve external storage connected to it like a NAS.
So, from a hardware and chipset perspective the Mac mini can do almost all this dock thus (ok, not eSATA). But from a software perspective it is not implemented and any network protocol which would be needed for NAS type functionality will be slower than pure TB (though one can channel Fibre Channel over TB which is pretty fast).
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A refurbished Mac mini might come close.
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I think Macs are marketed towards the 1% (if you take the whole world population).
Seconded.
That would be as high as I'd go for a hub / docking station.
I could really use the Gbit Ethernet and perhaps Firewire, not to mention USB 3.0 on the Air (although I'd have to upgrade anyway to get ThunderBolt and the next-gen probably will have USB 3.0 native). But for 450 bucks, really...
I'll probably end up getting the next-gen Air anyway and then I could use a USB 3.0 Gb-Ethernet dongle (which will probably set me back 50 bucks or so). So that leaves 400 for the convenience of plugging everything in with one cable.
I wonder why these products have to be so expensive. Is it intel that's trying to make a fortune off the chipsets? That would be dumb as it's their standard and this way it's a non-runner against USB 3.0. Or is it the vendors wanting to offload R&D on first-gen buyers. Again I think it's a bad idea to price them this high, they'll sell so few that they'll hardly make their investment back at all.
That eSATA port is awesome!! I have a dozen old hard drives laying around, and a whole bunch of SATA or eSATA cables, but I never plug them in because I don't have anything to go from eSATA to USB. It's too much hassle to connect them to my computer.
But $400 is really a bit much. Maybe when I'm rich...
But $400 is really a bit much. Maybe when I'm rich...
Be careful asking stuff like this on an Apple forum
But I completely agree with your post by the way. USB 3.0 will kill TB if prices remain this high. For an external drive USB 3.0 is only like a $10 premium now. It'll be standard on every external drive on the shelf in a few months.
- Pericom PI7C9X440SL PCIe-to-USB 2.0 host controller: $4.95 in bulk
- L129NB11 EFL Thunderbolt port controller: unknown
- Analog Devices ADAV4601 audio processor: $6.21
- NXP LPC2144 USB 2.0 microcontroller: $6.37
- Delta LFE9249 10/100/1000 Base-T LAN filter: $1 max
- SMSC USB2517-JZX USB 2.0 hub controller: $3.94
- LSI L-FW643E-2 Open Host Controller Interface (Firewire Controller): Quote only
- Broadcom BCM57761 Gigabit ethernet controller: Quote only
$22.47 for the parts I could find a price for on Google. The FW controller can't be more than 15 bucks or so since that's what a PCI-E firewire card costs which must contain a similar chip. Same with the Gbit controller, that can't cost more than $10. I assume both are much lower. Add it all up and it's still nothing to warrant the price.
That leaves the thunderbolt controller chip, intel doesn't mention its pricing and it's not available through parts vendors as far as I can see. But I can't imagine intel charges $100 or so for it, they would be killing their own standard in the face of cheap ubiquitous USB 3.0 devices.
I have two Voyager Q HDD docks which have FW800, eSATA and USB 2. For single HDDs, eSATA might not be much faster than FW800 but if I happen to put a SSD in it, eSATA should clearly pull ahead (whether that is worth getting an eSATA cable and whether that whole chain of TB-Belkin-eSATA-Voyager-SSD actually works in practice is another question).We listened to our end users, and raised the price as a result.
Why would I care to have eSATA when there's Thunderbolt AND USB3.0? Doesn't seem to make sense. I don't even use eSATA now, even though two or three of my machines have it.
Be careful asking stuff like this on an Apple forum
But I completely agree with your post by the way. USB 3.0 will kill TB if prices remain this high. For an external drive USB 3.0 is only like a $10 premium now. It'll be standard on every external drive on the shelf in a few months.
what do you mean "will"
USB3 is killing TB. I can walk to any computer store in my craptacular town and purchase a USB3 drive, Stick or whatever.
The only thing with TB that I can purchase is a Mac.
Why? I already have one for my iMac. Everything I buy is a tax writeoff...or I bill it to the client..so what do I care?
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I'd rather split 10GBps than 5GBps. That may work for you, but not for me. Toodles!
You will be spending nearly your entire budget on the motherboard itself with the controller and necessary pathing. ASUS just announced an add-in card to provide Thunderbolt support but the passthrough looks like something out of of a SCSI or SLI (the 3dfx one) "nightmare" from 1998.