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maricc

macrumors regular
Original poster
Oct 13, 2011
119
3
Does thunderbolt carry a charge like USB? If so, how come there is no thunderbolt iPhone cable? Would this be feasible? I feel like it would make a difference when restoring the phone and having to re-load all your songs etc. (which is slow via the cloud).
 
The USB cable is not the bottleneck. The flash storage is not fast enough to take advantage of thunderbolt.
 
Does thunderbolt carry a charge like USB? If so, how come there is no thunderbolt iPhone cable? Would this be feasible? I feel like it would make a difference when restoring the phone and having to re-load all your songs etc. (which is slow via the cloud).

You realize that USB 2.0 is faster than the cloud as well, right?
 
New iphone cable; USB 3.0 likely

I believe its likely a USB 3.0 iphone cable coming out in Sept.

Wlclhk:)
 
I believe its likely a USB 3.0 iphone cable coming out in Sept.

You'll need a new iPhone to go with that. Pretty sure the existing one doesn't support USB3 (which is not just a faster version of USB2 - USB3 cables have 5 extra wires; the plugs may look identical but they have extra pins tucked behind the USB 2 ones).

I suspect a possible shift to USB3 is one of the motivations behind the rumoured move to a new dock connector.

I wouldn't bet against it, but Thunderbolt seems unlikely - the iDevices won't be able to take full advantage of the speed, controller chips and cables are more expensive, and Apple wants to sell iDevices to people who <i>don't</i> have post-2011 Macs or Ultrabooks. Also, do iDevices even use PCIe internally (TB is basically 'external PCIe')?
 
I say no, and for all of the reasons already mentioned: scarcely compatible, expensive hardware, speed bottleneck, and just the fact that I can't see Apple spending that kind I'd money on corded features these day. The trend is wireless, not wires, especially for mobile devices.
 
- iPhone can't handle Thunderbolt speeds so there is no point of it.
- Yes thunderbolt can charge devices just like USB

The best we can hope is USB 3.0 support for the next gen-iPhone.
 
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