But, without hacking an iMac or mini, I'd be interested in hearing just how many iMac, mini, Air, or Macbook Pro owners actually use eSATA on a daily basis. And, how they use it so that eSATA is mission critical.
Esata is "native" connection for sata drive, so they usually offer optimal speed and ability to monitor drive's health (SMART etc.). It is and will be optimal way to connect a peripheral which has sata connection. Not many mac users use it, because Apple somehow hates it, but if Apple would have adopted it when it came and used it ever since, I guess at least most power users would use esata enclosures also with macs.
Esata enclosures are also very cost efficient, since there's minimal additional electronics in the enclosures. I've seen too many LaCies with burned controllers...
...because you need a PCIe SATA controller chip with T-Bolt. And you need a PCIe SATA controller kernel driver.
The USB converter doesn't need a kernel driver in the host, and has a simpler task (mapping USB storage commands to a subset of SATA commands).
On the other hand, people would expect PM support, and NCQ support, and FIS support from the T-Bolt device - but would never expect it from the $22 USB gadget.
Funny that you can get all those ports and a lot more in any motherboard with quarter of this dock's price. So you can't justify the price because of components even with magical tb controller. It's all about production volumes. Same thing when you add tb to a motherboard, its cost rises about 3 times more than what controller costs.
Lots of people here justifies the cost of tb, because it is "so capable of so much" which either almost no-one need and the rest of us doesn't want to pay. I use almost daily an AJA box that is connected via tb to imac and has ATBD as second screen. Tb is very nice for this, but I still hate the reflections of both screens!
I'd guess that most of those few that really uses tb for something, it is just for ATBD and nothing else. Those really few that use it for something else, use mostly just hdd/ssd enclosures and dongles. All these are very expensive for what they use and there would be much more cost efficient solutions if Apple just offered any options.
We all know that multigigabit interconnections are very high tech and therefore very expensive. The only way to bring costs down is through huge volumes of mass markets. This was the original idea of Light Peak. To bring optical connection to affordable level and then start increasing the speed. There's nothing revolutionary in tb as speedwise, we have had infinibands and fibrechannels for years. External PCI Express is also nothing new. The revolution would have been the cost of optical interconnection.
When Apple picked Light Peak with exclusivity and turned it to Copper Peak just for one product ATBD, that pretty much sealed tb's fate. And I guess that cost efficiency was not in mind at that time. Why short cables can't be passive? They can with every other similar connection (dp, hdmi, 10GbE, what else?).
Right now tb-products cost something like 2-10x what other similar cost. How many times the price is higher if they try to make even faster tb2?
Copper was chosen to tb since optical would have been even more expensive, although I think tb is so overpriced already that optical path wouldn't have made any difference. The tradeoff of this cheaper choice is that now optical connection does not get cheap (or it will became so a decade later when usb5 turns to optical) so this might be dead end for tb2. Anyway we will see a lot more very expensive active adapters...
Everybody is chanting that Apple's products are made for "average users". When this dude does not need ODD every week, it is taken away, but nothing will come in it's place. When Mr. Average needs cheap fast connection to hard drive, Apple keeps selling fw800 with huge premium, doesn't offer usb3 for 3 years more and focuses on magically expensive tb, that still offers nothing to this mister.
Seems to be that Apple's design goals are getting further away from practical benefits. If this Joe A. Verage could choose from a desktop computer that had expandability, upgradeability and maybe even user switchable storage/multiuse-slots or another one without all of those, but magical anorectic body, which one would be the sane and rational choice of Mr. Joe?
With double-glassy reflection please?
Could retina display and 2 storages live in a same mac?
Could IPS screen and 2 storages live in a same mac?
Could retina be matte?
Could there be matte retina in macbook with dual storage (ssd+hdd or fast ssd + huge ssd)?
Could macbookPRO had more storage devices than AIR?
Could someone ask Ive?