firewire had waaaay better acceptance in the marketplace than Thunderbolt. It was a common feature on midrange and high end intel motherboards for a few years around the end of Core 2 series and the start of the iX CPUs. Hell even the first few versions of the Playstation 2 had a firewire port on them... that's probably more firewire devices right there than the entirety of every non-Apple Thunderbolt device ever made. Tons of audio interfaces had it, even some camcorders had it in the late 90s and early 00s. Thunderbolt has not and will never see that level of adoption. There's still only been a handful of PC motherboards which have included it. Only a handful of audio interface makers have embraced it. Besides those and hard drive products, I havent heard of any other thunderbolt products besides docks and Apple's display ....I'd liken it more to eSATA, which was another dreadful standard nobody wanted.
The pathetic thing about Thunderbolt is not that its not used, it's the INSANE price tag. I had a major dilemma at work;
I needed more storage seeing how my MacBook was running out space. I take my work laptop home all the time but I didn't want to be bogged down with it everytime. I asked my boss for an expense to buy another drive considering I really need it. So, I could go for either a 2TB external USB 3.0 eventhough my 2011 MBP doesn't have USB 3.0, but then I'd be limited to 480mbit transfer speeds, but in reality I get more like 45mb/sec. Not good considering drives are capable of about 100mb/s. OR, I could opt for a TB based drive and pay literally 2-3 times as much money for one, have my boss say NO and as an added bonus, limit the usage to ONLY Macs in the office (some people use PCs).
I went out and bought a 2.5" drive @ 2TB and replaced my MacBooks internal drive with it. Decided speed was a requirement and Thunderbolt was pointless. Had my laptop had USB 3.0, the choice would have been really obvious, but thunderbolt's just an overall stupid decision. At home I got USB 3.0 on all my computers and laptops... half of them have thunderbolt as well... but what good is the port when no drive can saturate even USB 3.0 speeds and even if it does, am I really going to pay so much more money JUST to be able to say 'yeah, I've got a TB drive!' ???
NOBODY I've come across has had a thunderbolt device. NOT ONE.
Apple's severely mentally disabled when it comes to thunderbolt. I just wish the port VANISHED completely and let everyone ride on the USB 3.0 gravy train and have absolutely everyone on a universal and inexpensive port where everyone can share any device with any other device.
WHY does Apple insist on this proprietary crap being so expensive? We all know the price has been artificially inflated... but WHY do they do it? Are they incompetent and havent clued in that the market prefers cheap and universal even if TB is technically superior? Or are they so full of themselves they actually think people are willing to pay so much money for TB?