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USB connectors suck. You can't tell their direction by looking on them from the side and you always plug them the wrong way first (at least I do).

But in the end there will be €22 ($30) adapters and everyone will be happy (not).

wow, I'm pretty amazed there are people that can't manage to insert a USB connector properly.

Here's a tip, USB logo should be up, if there is no logo at all(rare), then holes on the connector should be up.
 
Well both Sony and Apple are engineering companies at heart, they both want/need to make better wheels, axles, gear boxes,.... or any other part they deal with in their products. I mean it's not like you could stop them, even if the Luddites came to power and passed a Law requiring technology to stand still the Sony/Apple guys would soon turn up as the techno underground.

Hey Sony electronics are still cool... mostly...

It's not like Sony never made technology that became standard though. They are after all responsable for big hits like 3 1/2" floppy, CD/DVD/Blu-Ray, Betacam amongst the most well known ones.
 
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Vitruviux said:
USB connectors suck. You can't tell their direction by looking on them from the side and you always plug them the wrong way first (at least I do).

But in the end there will be €22 ($30) adapters and everyone will be happy (not).

wow, I'm pretty amazed there are people that can't manage to insert a USB connector properly.

Here's a tip, USB logo should be up, if there is no logo at all(rare), then holes on the connector should be up.

And on the back of a tower?
 
Agreed. On a laptop it's not hard but on a tower or the back of an iMac it's a royal pain. Here's the thing, on those you aren't actually looking, you're feeling and that's what makes it a crappy design .... not as bad as S-Video though (ugh, what utter crap that one was).

You'll notice USB ports always face the same way though. It's just no one ever bothers to figure out which way that is.
 
DisplayPort 1.2

I guess just because it has higher bandwidth it isn't as simple as it would seem:

Wikipedia said:
The physical layer of Thunderbolt (in Thunderbolt mode) is very similar to DisplayPort 1.2, with 20 Gbit/s bandwidth. However, Thunderbolt is bi-directional, which often requires sophisticated reflection and cross-talk suppression techniques, such as used in 10 Gigabit Ethernet.
 
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And on the back of a tower?

Step 1: Set down the bag of Cheetos
Step 2: Finish your Mountain Dew
Step 3: Get up from your chair and proceed to a vantage point that best reveals the orientation of the USB ports.

Once all this is complete, you should have a reasonably attainable chance of plugging in the desired peripheral.

Optional Step 4: Upon realizing the accumulation of dust behind said tower, ask Mom for a "wet paper towel" to remove dust accumulation.
 
Registering "Thunderbolt" trademark is a start of the end of thunderbolt. As "KnightWRX" said, you only register trademark when you plan on collecting royalties in the future or you are planning on suing anyone who doesn't pay royalties.

You don't need official trademark paperwork to prove that this technology is yours. It is your invention even if you don't have the paperwork. Even if you have the design and technology sketched out on a napkin, you can still prove that you are the inventor. And with current press coverage of thunderbolt invention, it won't be hard to do so.

But given that if Apple is awarded this trademark, nobody will pay royalties to Apple. This is Firewire all over again. Trademark is good for two things, collecting royalties and suing anyone who doesn't pay royalties.
 
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toddybody said:
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And on the back of a tower?

Step 1: Set down the bag of Cheetos
Step 2: Finish your Mountain Dew
Step 3: Get up from your chair and proceed to a vantage point that best reveals the orientation of the USB ports.

Once all this is complete, you should have a reasonably attainable chance of plugging in the desired peripheral.

Optional Step 4: Upon realizing the accumulation of dust behind said tower, ask Mom for a "wet paper towel" to remove dust accumulation.

Way too damn complicated. I pay the big bucks for Apple products because they are user friendly.
 
Here's the thing about USB 3.0 vs Thunderbolt: in practical usage, no one is going to be exceeding USB 3.0 speeds with their MacBook anytime soon.

The question is: do you want to have to buy and connect adapters and dongles or not?

Having paid through the nose for several flavors of mini-Displayport adapters already, not having dongles and Y-cables is of much more value than extra speed I will never use during the lifetime of my current MacBook.
 
Unrelated. Glad to see what CP80 is doing to protect children from accessing pornography. BTW, are they a proponent of mandatory use of .xxx for pornographic sites?
Not sure really. I'll have to look into it.

[EDIT] Upon further research it seems like, yes they are. I found an older Ars article on something very similar that cp80 proposed to ICANN.
 
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Makes more sense this way though. Unplugging your monitor to swap hard drives sounds like a pain. Though this fragmentation sure isn't going to help adoption if true. Now who's going to be stuck with converters ? Apple or Sony ?

Lets be clear, the USB forum said NO.

Thunderbolt has daisy chain, why do you need to unplug to connect your hdd?
 
Does anybody understand port technologies? It's not an issue over the physical dimensions of the cable. At issue is all the signals and electricity that flows through the port.

If the standard has been adopted that uses Mini DP, then everybody should use Mini DP. If Sony sticks a Thunderbolt port in there with USB size, I can potentially see many fried ports. TB is supposed to charge devices much quicker, which means more voltage. If someone mistakenly puts a TB cable in there, will it blow the port?

The ONLY way I see this as logical is if this is a USB 3 port somehow. Otherwise, it sounds like Sony's MiniDisc/Memory Stick track record.
 
I don't think I have ever seen a mini displayport on anything other than Apple hardware.
I have seen USB on, well, every PC since 2000. Well done Sony. Stick to common ports.

(1) Apple and Intel co-developed Thunderbolt and Apple was first to introduce it
(2) The USB forum said NOT to combine Thunderbolt and USB

Doesn't anyone read the articles before posting? Oh, and the new ThinkPad X1 uses mini DisplayPort.
 
Does anybody understand port technologies? It's not an issue over the physical dimensions of the cable. At issue is all the signals and electricity that flows through the port.

If the standard has been adopted that uses Mini DP, then everybody should use Mini DP. If Sony sticks a Thunderbolt port in there with USB size, I can potentially see many fried ports. TB is supposed to charge devices much quicker, which means more voltage. If someone mistakenly puts a TB cable in there, will it blow the port?
Not likely. Generally ports detect what's attached and only when it's been confirmed as a compatible plug is power allowed.
 
Hardly Inferior

Thunderbolt is an inferior display transport. 10 Gbps is lower than both DP 1.2 and HDMI 1.4 specifications. Why anyone would want to use pure Thunderbolt for display signal transport baffles the mind.

Thunderbolt: 10Gbps/2 channels (that's 20Gbps, total)
DisplayPort 1.2: 21.6Gbps spread across 4 lanes
HDMI 1.4: 10.2Gbps, single channel

Thunderbolt is roughly as fast as DisplayPort, and unlike DP is fully bi-directional. I'd say it's an appropriate replacement for all but extremely high-end professional video use. And of course, Light Peak is waiting out in the distance to displace pretty much every other interface for that application...
 
No, right now it's used as a port (Intel introduced a port technology named Thunderbolt, Apple just put it on laptops). The field is not as precise as you make it sound to be, and the product was released the world over making geographic location moot.

They didn't need to register it to protect it. The reason for registering is to get damages which tells me they will be pulling a Firewire. Let's hope they learned that lesson though, for their sake and their port's sake.

I was dealing with the assumption that we were talking about Apple, since that's who this is about. Apple's field of use, so far, is quite narrow.

The reason for registering is not solely to get damages - it is to extend scope geographically, and to extend scope to the limits of the trademark classes under which the mark is registered. (You may be able to get damages even without registration under state laws). Further it provides federal protection. Otherwise trademark scope extends only to the extend the mark is actually used in commerce, and protection is determined by state unfair competition laws which can vary from location to location.
 
Do you sleep well at night knowing you don't know what you are talking about ? Again, Apple is the one that forced Sony to use a different name back in the 90s. Apple was preventing everyone from using Firewire.

Sony was the one that used unpowered 4-pin Firewire over the powered 6-pin version and then introduced a special power port next to the 4-pin port to enable powered Firewire. When asked why they did this instead of just using powered 6-pin in the first place they said it was done in order to sell special adaptor cable combining separate 4-pin Firewire and power as they make a lot of money on accessories.

:rolleyes:
 
wow, I'm pretty amazed there are people that can't manage to insert a USB connector properly.

Here's a tip, USB logo should be up, if there is no logo at all(rare), then holes on the connector should be up.

And what about when the USB socket is rotated (as on the back of a lot of consumer electronics equipment, where it's hard to actually see which way the thing is aligned?)
 
You can pipe USB 3 through ThunderBolt.

With a $99 dongle, of course.


I don't want to unplug my external monitor from my MBA to plug in an HDD.

I don't want to quiesce and dismount my TBolt disk drives in order to plug/unplug something in a friggin' daisy chain.


I've heard you can't. Are you sure? Strange that I've seen companies like Sonnet announce (not ship of course!) Thunderbolt adapters for FireWire 800 and Gigabit Ethernet, but no USB3 variant. You'd think USB3 would be the first one they'd support.

Someday, they'll come.
 
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