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

[xraydoc]

Originally Posted by NutsNGum

Blunderbolt.

Unfortunately, this sums it up rather well.

Lots of promise. Lots of promises.

Despite that, I very much like my 27" TB display.

[GoreVidal]

Originally Posted by baryon

PS: Those who have the first computers that had Thunderbolt, your computers will soon go obsolete while you still hadn't even had a chance to connect anything to the Thunderbolt port. Just like the Mini DisplayPort.

Um, I use Thunderbolt every day.

[Mike Oxard]

Originally Posted by MacDav

I still say it should have been called "Lightning Bolt". I've heard of a Bolt of Lightning, but not a Bolt of Thunder. By the time I buy a new Mac Pro, it will be available everywhere as a standard.

You are joking right? It's only in one of the most famous songs ever!

"Thunderbolts and lightning
Very very frightening
To mee to meeee to meeeeeeeee"

Air guitar solo

[violaboy]

Okay Monoprice, this is your chance to make one of these and sell it for about $75.

[pmz]

Originally Posted by realeric

Fail

Thunderbolt
Ping
Mobile Me
Siri
Passbook
Newsstand
Safari for PC
iAd

Half fail/half success

iMessage
iCloud
Photostream
iBooks
Lightning

Success/To be successful

iTunes
App Store
Safari for iPhones
Camera
Maps

This is a very poor post.

That's the best I can do without getting banned by the hyper sensitive church of macrumors.

[magbarn]

Originally Posted by ChrisA

RPM is how fast the platter spins, not how fast the data comes off the platter. Just like on your car, the tachometer does not tell you how fast you are going.

In isk drives, sustained i/o rate is the aerial bit density times the tangential speed. Instantaneous bit rate is set by the speed of the drive's cache.

For a given generation of HD, usually the higher platter speed=higher transfer rates. That said, the majority of 2012 5400rpm hard drives easily exceed USB 2.0 transfer rates almost two-fold. So even 5400rpm drives get a speed boost from TB/USB 3.0

[portishead]

It will eventually be released. Just because the shipping dates were pushed doesn't make it vaporware. The title is misleading a little.

[aloshka]

Why is it so hard to develop a dock that just simply has USB, and dual DVI outputs.. That's it. I don't want to connect two thunderbolts to my laptop, but just one + power is ideal.

[Tombs]

Originally Posted by xraydoc

Unfortunately, this sums it up rather well.

Lots of promise. Lots of promises.

Despite that, I very much like my 27" TB display.

I'm sure you are but the rest of the world would probably use and buy that display if Apple would include more than one isolated connection, f&&ling stupid of Apple imo to try and make a fantastic display generic with only apple products. TB has a future but it has to come down in price and I fear that apple have in the pipeline and about to go live a new display connection/power source connector that again will only work with apple products.

----------

Originally Posted by aloshka

Why is it so hard to develop a dock that just simply has USB, and dual DVI outputs.. That's it. I don't want to connect two thunderbolts to my laptop, but just one + power is ideal.

Spot on!

----------

Originally Posted by pmz

This is a very poor post.

That's the best I can do without getting banned by the hyper sensitive church of macrumors.

Why? Because you dont agree? Typical fanboy...

[curmudgeon32]

Originally Posted by realeric

Half fail/half success

iMessage

Have to disagree with you on iMessage. When it works, it's transparent, free and powerful. When it fails, it defaults to SMS and the message goes through anyway. When my daughter was overseas last winter, we exchanged massive numbers of texts via iMessage, many with photos and video attached. And it was 100% free (aside from the cost of her UK data plan).

And under iOS6 and Mountain Lion they've finally got the synchronization pretty well down from what I can tell. I'm seeing near perfect syncing of messages among my two Macs and iPhone.

In my experience, iMessage "just works" and you barely know it's there. That seems like a success to me.

[avanpelt]

If it hasn't taken off after nearly two years, I suspect it was DOA. Sure, the promise of Thunderbolt was awesome, but it was probably three or four years too early.

USB 3.0 will do everything most people need and Thunderbolt will remain the FireWire of this decade until it's slowly phased out of Apple hardware after six or seven years.

[thekev]

Originally Posted by thejadedmonkey

My macbook air has been such a diappointment, on so many levels. I don't think I'd get a docking station for it anymore, even if they were cheaper. It's just not worth it when you have a full desktop [read as: a computer with a real HDD] a foot away.

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

Originally Posted by PracticalMac

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.

They try to do too many things directly at times. Firewire had some advantages and held out a long time in certain areas due to stability and lack of cpu overhead. The different connector for FW800 didn't help.

Originally Posted by woodbine

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

It is progressing pretty much as I expected. Intel isn't really pushing it, and it falls into a sort of weird mid range spot in terms of cost and bandwidth. It exceeds usb3 in performance, but on the consumer end usb3 is likely to be a better match. It matches a much broader range of existing peripheral devices and will not necessarily become a bottleneck in most use cases. If we're talking about people using things like mini-SAS and RAID arrays, thunderbolt is slower than existing solutions.

Originally Posted by ghettochris

Current thunderbolt is, but its made to scale up and go optical and 10x as fast eventually I think.

Intel quotes a lot of far out numbers at times. I think displayport 1.2 is coming to thunderbolt around 2014. The standard has been around since 2010. The bandwidth has to originate somewhere anyway. It isn't just determined by the connector or cable. You require adequate available PCI lanes and a way to implement the chip. Anyway I'm all for a single cable solution that works, but this one works in a very limited number of use cases.

[Tombs]

Originally Posted by curmudgeon32

Have to disagree with you on iMessage. When it works, it's transparent, free and powerful. When it fails, it defaults to SMS and the message goes through anyway. When my daughter was overseas last winter, we exchanged massive numbers of texts via iMessage, many with photos and video attached. And it was 100% free (aside from the cost of her UK data plan).

And under iOS6 and Mountain Lion they've finally got the synchronization pretty well down from what I can tell. I'm seeing near perfect syncing of messages among my two Macs and iPhone.

In my experience, iMessage "just works" and you barely know it's there. That seems like a success to me.

Its never synced for me or 2 of my friends....I love the idea of being able to send a message using a keyboard but if the conversation doesnt flow between all devices than its ****

[rumplestiltskin]

Harry Anderson said he knew what "IIfx" was short for: "too ****** expensive".

That's the problem with Thunderbolt. If Apple can sell a $30 Thunderbolt-to-Firewire800 adapter, we should have similarly priced adapters for eSata and USB3.

Think Blu-ray was a bag of hurt?

[nagromme]

TB is great technology, but there’s really only one thing I want from it: external GPUs! A MacBook Air that has better graphics at home than when I’m on the go. Maybe the only supported GPUs would be the ones Apple already sells for Mac Pros, I don’t know... but something! Please.

[realeric]

Originally Posted by curmudgeon32

Have to disagree with you on iMessage. When it works, it's transparent, free and powerful. When it fails, it defaults to SMS and the message goes through anyway. When my daughter was overseas last winter, we exchanged massive numbers of texts via iMessage, many with photos and video attached. And it was 100% free (aside from the cost of her UK data plan).

And under iOS6 and Mountain Lion they've finally got the synchronization pretty well down from what I can tell. I'm seeing near perfect syncing of messages among my two Macs and iPhone.

In my experience, iMessage "just works" and you barely know it's there. That seems like a success to me.

Apple would have made Android/Windows 8/Blackberry apps so that I could send free text messages to my friends, like KakaoTalk.

[Tombs]

Originally Posted by nagromme

TB is great technology, but there’s really only one thing I want from it: external GPUs! A MacBook Air that has better graphics at home than when I’m on the go. Maybe the only supported GPUs would be the ones Apple already sells for Mac Pros, I don’t know... but something! Please.

Ive been waiting for this...its almost there but for some strange reason only Sony launched an external GPU for their own net book last year...an enclosure that enabled you to fit any GPU linking your MBP to a decent external display would surely be a hit?

[G4DP]

So this why the MacPro hasn't been updated?

Apple know it's dead in the water and are skipping TB? Just going with 10 USB3.0 ports. 8 on the back and 2 on the front.

[jdiamond]

Originally Posted by ovrlrd

The problem is how ambitious these companies have been. They want the docks to do just about everything possible. No surprise it isn't easy to achieve their lofty goal.

They should have made two docks, one with just USB3 + Gigabit Ethernet, and another with all their fancy trimmings.

Another issue that hasn't been raised yet - most people will only need one of these additional legacy ports, so it's not going to be much more useful than waiting for an Apple Thunderbolt to Firewire800 adapter, or Thunderbolt to X adapter. There's already USB3 ports on the laptop...

[Fandongo]

Originally Posted by realeric

Fail

Thunderbolt
Ping
Mobile Me
Siri
Passbook
Newsstand
Safari for PC
iAd

I don't expect anything from anyone technology anymore.
They're so tightly sealed, we never hear dates.
When we do hear dates, they're lies.


Additional Fails:
Cover Flow
Fullscreen

Cover flow (decent for album art...i guess) should be a useful and customizable tool for scavenging through all files, w/ an auto fullscreen option for photos/video.

Fullscreen... Holy crap. I use the entirety of available space. The dock/menu bar obstruct functionality, all of their uses could easily be integrated w/ launchpad.

No dual monitor...what? Distraction free, my sack. BTT's snapping feature is brilliant... why not add a shift function and make it impervious to linen.

My junk phone shouldn't be better at fullscreen than my workstation.

[MacDav]

Originally Posted by Mike Oxard

You are joking right? It's only in one of the most famous songs ever!

"Thunderbolts and lightning
Very very frightening
To mee to meeee to meeeeeeeee"

Air guitar solo

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.

[bobobenobi]

Originally Posted by nutmac

As for Lightning, how is it half fail/success? Would you have said the same for USB when it debuted in 1995 but didn't take up until it iMac adopted it as exclusive peripheral connector 3 years later?

Realeric probably wasn't alive back then.

[willcapellaro]

For the record, there is a great first-party thunderbolt docking station: it has an excellent screen attached, comes with speakers and camera. It's a good value and is successful. I wouldn't turn one down. In fact, Apple should give me one for free to help smooth over my upcoming painful transition from ACD/Displayport to Thunderbolt/Thunderport.

Seriously, Apple may have never created a USB hub or other middleware, but it wouldn't be a half-bad stopgap product to plug the cry-holes of professionals and prosumers who don't want or can't afford an Apple display, and to help grease the skids of Thunderbolt adoption.

It's may not be elegant visually but it would be usably.

[Exhale]

What is it with the over-happy use of the term 'vaporware' lately? Granted, many Thunderbolt uses are falling under the classifications. A lot of talk, but nothing (or very little) ever shows.

Though again, not really much of a surprise - its largely been a solution in search of a problem. Where most such problems have more cost effective solutions.

[curmudgeon32]

Originally Posted by Tombs

Its never synced for me or 2 of my friends....I love the idea of being able to send a message using a keyboard but if the conversation doesnt flow between all devices than its ****

When you say "never" do you mean pre-ML and iOS6? Because I had a ton of trouble getting syncing sorted prior to those updates as well. It was very spotty in the Lion beta and still rough in the first 10.8 version. But post Mountain Lion and iOS6, it's working perfectly. The only hitch I occasionally see is an old message or two showing on the Mac out of sequence when it "catches up" to what I was doing on the phone before.

One thing I did in the desktop version of Messages in Mountain Lion was to disable "caller ID" on all email addresses except my phone number. Not sure if that's necessary, but I was sick of people telling me they got a weird text from my Apple ID email address when I responded via the desktop.