Third-Party Thunderbolt Docking Stations Remain Vaporware as Shipping Dates Pushed Back

MacDav said:

Well yes, it's a figure of speech, but not something that actually exits in reality. You have a shaft (bolt) of lightning pulled to earth ground (Speed of light), followed by a clap of thunder (speed of sound). I maintain there is no such thing as a bolt of thunder in the real world. There can be no thunder without lightning happening first. In a song lyric "Thunderbolts and lightning" sounds better than "Lightning and Thunderbolts", and Thunderbolts doesn't rhyme with "frightening". "Lightning and Thunder" has been used in lyrics. It works well, and is also chronologically correct. For some reason people say "Thunder and Lightning" instead of "Lightning and Thunder". Possibly because they always hear the thunder, but inside a building you may not see the lightning bolt which always comes first.

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Ah yes but we generally refer to the storms as Thunder Storms not Lightning Storms, so a bolt that was the product of such a storm and that caused thunder could be called a Thunder Bolt. The event itself causes both light and sound so 'bolt' could apply to either.

Anyway, I think they should have named it Thunder Clap, as it has proven to be about as popular as 'The Clap' !

blizaine said:

The main problem is the price, obviously. A secondary problem is the lack of dual TB ports on most of these things. I have a BlackMagic HDMI Thunderbolt box. It's really cool, except it only has 1 freakin port. So I can't put it inline with an external display, or maybe even an additional BlackMagic box. It seems kind of shortsighted.

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I wish there was some sort of daisy-chain cable instead, with nodes coming off where you could attach devices. Then you might actually be able to use that feature of the spec!

The fact that Apple was the only one with licensed Thunderbolt for year is actually hurting the consumers. Well played! DAMN!

Everything is wrong with Apple since Cookie took over. Game over Apple!

Apple = Steve Jobs.

MacDav said:

Well yes, it's a figure of speech, but not something that actually exits in reality. You have a shaft (bolt) of lightning pulled to earth ground (Speed of light), followed by a clap of thunder (speed of sound). I maintain there is no such thing as a bolt of thunder in the real world. There can be no thunder without lightning happening first. In a song lyric "Thunderbolts and lightning" sounds better than "Lightning and Thunderbolts", and Thunderbolts doesn't rhyme with "frightening". "Lightning and Thunder" has been used in lyrics. It works well, and is also chronologically correct. For some reason people say "Thunder and Lightning" instead of "Lightning and Thunder". Possibly because they always hear the thunder, but inside a building you may not see the lightning bolt which always comes first.

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While the flash of a lightning bolt is at the speed of light (obviously), the bolt's speed traveling to the ground is far slower

Maybe pros would adopt Thunderbolt more if it was actually on the Mac Pro. Geez Apple, get your act together with this! It's a tower! How hard can it be?

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PracticalMac said:

No clap of thunder here.

Its like FireWire all over again. Apple was slow to include, made only 2 products to use it, and it started to loose ground to a much lesser technology, USB.

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So sad... USB is so lame.

Thunderbolt makes Brings You Vaporware like...

...Chrysler minivans brought the 60,000 mile transmission... After a while it just seems acceptable but companies (not just Belkin and Matrox) should be punished for it. They will get a pass though because they created a buzz.

More examples, but this is just a tip of the iceberg:

Sonnet Technologies and their TB Raid enclosures to compete with Promise. Inconspicuously disappeared from their website after more than six months of marketing and promises. They did deliver a couple of other TB devices, late I might add, or at least later than sales and marketing promised.

Has anyone heard any news on the OCZ Lightfoot drive demo'd and praised by the likes of Anand last January? OCZ put it on their boast list again around May/June and not a peep since. Guess what... you won't hear a peep but no-one holds OCZ to task, instead they got the praise and good press at the time from folks like Anand. Pure garbage if you ask me, but no-one with any clout is taking OCZ to task for their bait and ... wait ... nothing!

The fact that Matrox and Belkin announced these products so far in advance pretty much guaranteed that it was simply marketing and sales blowing the horns that engineering had no hope in delivering on time if ever.

Cheers,
Sean

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woodbine said:

And for another 500 bucks you can get a 27" screen thrown in......

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You don't have to fork out another 50 bucks for a cable to make it work!

The prices of these hubs, and the additional cost of the cables.. pretty much nails this tech as dead for now.

It seems every revision of the Apple laptops comes with less and less ports, so we have to buy more and more dongles/hubs to compensate.

• Apple Display Connection > DVI/VGA adapter
• miniVGA and miniDVI adapter
• FireWire 800 > 400 adapter
• USB > Ethernet adapter
• Displayport > VGA/DVI
• Thunderbolt > FW
• Thunderbolt > Ethernet
• Thunderbolt > VGA/DVI
• Thunderbolt > Line in

It's all very well having a thin and easily portable laptop, but when you need a boatload of $29 dongles to connect to pretty much anything, it defeats the point a bit...!

Thunderbolt is a great idea, but it's just too expensive to implement... It needs some kind of cheap simplified client controller chip so the host can do more processing without the need for complex circuitry in the attached device, which is what USB does. It could still be compatible with the more complex/faster devices like RAIDs and hubs, but few devices need that much bandwidth.

lukarak said:

This is pathetic.

400 bucks for this?

And what's with the thunderbolt connector in the front?

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Yeah, really. In lieu of a retina Thunderbolt display, Apple should release:

Thunderbolt Display Mini
$600-$650

Extra wide 21" with these exact same ports
Detachable base, airplay ready...3rd party battery packs

thekev said:

What made it such a disappointment? I thought you had a Dell notebook.

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I do, I had a 2006 MacBook pro that was stolen. I used insurance money to buy a 2011 MacBook pro, hated how absurdly hot it got, and swapped it for a MacBook air. The MacBook air is nice, but ultimately it's too gimped and more often than not it ends up being a $1200 Facebook machine.

I use my 2011 Dell most of the time, unless I'm headed to Starbucks

Frisco said:

Everything is wrong with Apple since Cookie took over. Game over Apple!

Apple = Steve Jobs.

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Thunderbolt debuted in early 2011 i.e. the negotiations were concluded in 2010, when Steve was still "healthy".

Somebody please just make some sort of affordable Thunderbolt device and come out with it quickly. The cherries of my 27" iMac's Thunderbolt ports are waiting to be popped!

iMikeT said:

Somebody please just make some sort of affordable Thunderbolt device and come out with it quickly. The cherries of my 27" iMac's Thunderbolt ports are waiting to be popped!

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LaCie Rugged mini with Thunderbolt and USB 3.0 interface, 120GB SSD. Includes Thunderbolt and USB cable. Stock at announcement, $199. There are also 256GB SSD and 1TB HDD versions.

LaCie also has been shipping the eSATA hub, the Little Big Disk, and the 2big for quite some time.

Black Magic Design is also shipping devices, as are WD, Seagate, G-Tech, Buffalo, Sonnet and Promise.

Apple is shipping relatively inexpensive FireWire and Ethernet adapters @$29 ea.

Windows laptops are shipping with Thunderbolt ports. There are motherboards shipping with Thunderbolt ports for the DIY and BYO crowd.

I guess the only real complaint is that you are lacking the $$$ to purchase, or are unable to justify spending the $$$. In the meantime, there are plenty of USB 3.0 devices that may be more attractive to your budget. YEah, too bad the USB ports in the Apple Thunderbolt Display are USB 2.0

Will Thunderbolt devices get down to reasonable prices? The LaCie Rugged mini w/SSD gets pretty close @$199. The Buffalo portable drives aren't too bad, either. Both include the $49 Thunderbolt cable. I'll admit that the El Gato SSD portable drive is a bit too expensive, with lackluster performance and does not include a cable in the US market.

Most likely the docking stations are not shipping for several reasons:
- they don't work
- the software drivers aren't finished

The above listed manufacturers have figured out how to get products out the door, so the hardware design issues should be resolved.

Apple figured out how to implement a dock within a display.

There must be some other factors preventing progress and shipping products. Heck, if it were simple, everyone would be doing it, right?

We know from experience there are many USB 3.0 hubs available; a few even work!

haruhiko said:

Thunderbolt debuted in early 2011 i.e. the negotiations were concluded in 2010, when Steve was still "healthy".

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Glad that you put quotes around "healthy" - since it was clear in 2009 that Jobs' cancer was spreading....

I just want my Thunderbolt graphics card. I want to play awesome games on my 13-inch.

CWallace said:

see if Apple updates the iMac and Mac Mini with USB3 and verify that their products correctly work with them?

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USB 3.0 will put the final stake into Thunderbolt ... the technology that never was.

AidenShaw said:

Glad that you put quotes around "healthy" - since it was clear in 2009 that Jobs' cancer was spreading....

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Early 2010 was the last time that Steve looked right, as you can see in WWDC 2010, he gained some weight. After that, in late 2010 "Back to the Mac" keynote, Steve started to look very weak and the rest is history.

jasonefmonk said:

I just want my Thunderbolt graphics card. I want to play awesome games on my 13-inch.

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By the time you're done paying for all that external crap, you could've bought a 15" with a dedicated GPU... a GPU that is faster than any external card the Thunderbolt could support...

lukarak said:

And what's with the thunderbolt connector in the front?

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I think the idea is you keep all your accessories plugged into the back and plug your MacBook in to the front.

How effing hard is this?

I want the back of the Thunderbolt display. Add a second Thunderbolt port. Upgrade to USB3. Done.

Really, people, why can't this get done?

mdriftmeyer said:

The pricing is insulting. You've got $20 in electronic chips and $15 in packaging and they want how much?

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Any different from Apple's prices?

\-V-/ said:

By the time you're done paying for all that external crap, you could've bought a 15" with a dedicated GPU... a GPU that is faster than any external card the Thunderbolt could support...

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The only problem is that then you're stuck with a bigger device, which not everyone wants. It's like when people argue that if you're going to use a keyboard with an iPad then you might as well get a notebook. The major flaw in this argument is that it assumes that the person is going to want to use that external component 100% of the time.

So $20 worth of chips and $15 worth of packaging, eh?

Unfortunately that is very far off the mark. If these devices could be built for $35 and sold for $249-$399 they would actually have made it to market. I think the obvious reason why these products are still nonexistent is that nobody thinks they can make a profit by producing them.

The DSL3510L Thunderbolt controller costs $30 all by itself, last I checked.

And then there's the SATA, FireWire 800, USB 3.0 and Ethernet controllers, the USB audio device, about ten chips to deal with video output, the physical jacks, power adapter, the licensing fees for HDMI and Thunderbolt, certification expenses for all supported protocols, the cost of developing and validating drivers for any controllers used that don't have native Mac OS X support... The BOM for these things is no joke.

repoman27 said:

So $20 worth of chips and $15 worth of packaging, eh?

Unfortunately that is very far off the mark. If these devices could be built for $35 and sold for $249-$399 they would actually have made it to market. I think the obvious reason why these products are still nonexistent is that nobody thinks they can make a profit by producing them.

The DSL3510L Thunderbolt controller costs $30 all by itself, last I checked.

And then there's the SATA, FireWire 800, USB 3.0 and Ethernet controllers, the USB audio device, about ten chips to deal with video output, the physical jacks, power adapter, the licensing fees for HDMI and Thunderbolt, certification expenses for all supported protocols, the cost of developing and validating drivers for any controllers used that don't have native Mac OS X support... The BOM for these things is no joke.

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http://www.gigabyte.us/press-center/news-page.aspx?nid=1140

Newegg: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813128559&Tpk=Gigabyte GA-Z77X-UP5 TH

For $229 I get a state of the art Motherboard with Dual Thunderbolt Ports.

Sorry, but the pricing is way overpriced. I'd rather build out a Linux Box with this Mobo, but Belkin wants to charge $399 for this hub?

http://www.belkin.com/thunderbolt/

Sorry, but Gigabyte could eat Belkin's lunch in a flash by gutting that Motherboard down to size and putting a fancy case on it for $199 and own the market while still making a hefty profit.

It's a joke price and a useless product once more Mobo generic manufacturers in the Windows world have dual Thunderbolt on-board.

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Mackan said:

Any different from Apple's prices?

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A lot different.