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Another thought...

Will they make this 'new' Thunderbolt connector reversible?

It's taken USB how many years now to finally bring out a reversible connector? If this standard is going to stick around it might help if they don't overlook something that simple. It drives me insane that we've not bothered to improve on the Classic USB socket for so long, especially after a dozen stupid non reversible versions.

I have to admit I really like the Lightning connector, obviously Apple wouldn't let everyone use it royalty free but that would be awesome if they did. Small, robust and reversible - everything current USB is not.

The current Apple lightening cable is what 16pins but only 8 active as Apple only uses a one sided socket, so they only need 4 more pins for the current thunderbolt cable. MiniDisplayport connector is already 50% wider so 20+ pins in the same style of connector as lightening should be more than doable.

Would certainly make for a thin laptop.
 
Thunderbolt won't really take off until Apple starts releasing graphics drivers which allows for external GPU's. All the hardware is in place, the only problem is that the drivers need to allow for Thunderbolt-connected devices, and they don't. This would allow any laptop to act as a very powerful desktop workstation and/or gaming setup, for example, and it would make the Thunderbolt adaption sky-rocket. The only reason they are not updating their drivers is they would sell less laptops that way, as they would last longer. Can't help but feel that apple is holding back TB quite a lot.
 
They would loose that status if you where to spend a little money on them, maybe buy a dinner or harddrive to get them going.


Believe me, I have no problem spending money in order to pop my iMac's Thunderbolt cherry but the enclosure and hard drives that I have my eyes on will set me back about $1,000. That $1,000 means a lot to me at the moment and will make the difference between me eating or not for the next few months.

Of course, if you want to help me out and send me $1,000 so I can buy these accessories, I would be more than thankful and even make a video of the momentous occasion just for you.

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I'm firmly in this camp, and I've been angry about it since 2011! I'd pay $50 for a TB to USB3 dongle, but I'm not going to spend $300 (or more!) on a giant hub with every connection known to man. There is one reason, and one reason only that a product like this doesn't exist. Greed. They know there aren't millions of us so they are using higher dollar devices to keep their profits higher.

Assuming Apple wants TB to be widely adapted, Apple should be the one selling this! The TB rollout is truly baffling. Its really like they want to hold back adoption of it.


For me it's more about affordable external enclosures and external hard drives.

For a while, the least expensive external 2TB hard drive was going for $400. While bare enclosures (Drobo for example) were going for $700.

I managed to find a bare 4-bay enclosure for about $500 and the drives will set me back another $450 or so. However, that ~$1,000 is a lot of money to me at the moment.
 
Believe me, I have no problem spending money in order to pop my iMac's Thunderbolt cherry but the enclosure and hard drives that I have my eyes on will set me back about $1,000. That $1,000 means a lot to me at the moment and will make the difference between me eating or not for the next few months.

Eating is so overrated...
Also, it seems to me that you don't need Thunderbolt.
 
but can't we first just focus on making something to plug into the port that doesn't cost an arm and a leg?
 
Forget affordable, how about JUST MAKE IT. Price is irrelevant when almost nothing even exists that uses the IO in the first place. Even in professional markets it's fairly rare.

It's the "PCI slot" on macs now. Fibre channel devices. 10 Gb ethernet devices. And with this soon external GPUs. There is definitely use for it in the "pro" market, at least as much as there was a use for PCIe cards.
 
Twice as fast as the last twice as fast upgrade, and still its too damn expensive and there are no decent devices that use it... ill stick with USB, cheap, readily available, and a million million devices for every need.

Thunderbolts killer device would still be an external box, that had a PSU and took an external desktop video card, so you can supercharge your AIR when your at your desk, but this box will need to cost less than Americas Annual national debt.
 
... silverstone were building an external thunderbolt enclosure for a GPU before Intel stopped it. Not sure exactly why, perhaps to do with their own iGPU's.

Do you have a source for the claim that Intel forced SilverStone to stop their development? I'm not doubting you, it's just that I've searched and found no reference.
 
Yet another connector. Great.

Hopefully they at least make this one locking, like XLR mic cables. I'm REALLY TIRED of my Thunderbolt hard drives getting disconnected!!!!!

It's the same damn connector, the only difference is the controller in the processor that will allow higher bandwidth.

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We won't see this until Skylake according to the chart, so it'll be a while (Intel's roadmap = Ivy Bridge, then Haswell, then Broadwell, then Skylake). Considering the current Mac Pros are on Ivy Bridge, it'll really be a while before it makes it to that platform (next gen MP will almost certainly have Haswell-EP). And despite Intel providing adapters to facilitate backwards-compatibility with TB1 and TB2, no one's going to adopt this as a standard if they keep changing the physical connectors.

Ivy Bridge came out in 2012, and Haswell came out recently...

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Oh yes. A 2880p Thunderbolt Display @ 60Hz might be coming. That would allow as much screen estate as the current TBD (unlike 4K which would offer less) when HiDPI is enabled. It would also explain why Mavericks has 2880p wallpapers.

What? the current Retina macbook's resolution is 2880x1800... that's why wallpapers are that size...
 
Thunderbolt 3 is nice but the Thunderbolt 1 ports in my 2011 iMac are still virgins. :eek:

Spot on there!

Finally made use of the iMac TB last December when I bought a MBP and there were many simple things that could be buffered out like when pressing CMD+F2 on the iMac to swap screens to the MPB, it would be nice that it could disable the iMac bluetooth and enable MBP bluetooth to allow you to use the iMac keyboard and mouse...!!

Does anyone know if there is a fix for the above cannot find one?
 
This is where it gets a bit hard to decide whether to invest in Thunderbolt now or not; the roadmap suggests that it will catch up very quickly to PCIe speeds, until it's effectively a true external PCIe bus.

Hopefully Intel's processors are rushing to provide the necessary bandwidth to support six or more Thunderbolt ports, plus two powerful GPUs on a single CPU, otherwise the future Mac Pro generations are going to be a bit shaky.


But yeah, what we really need to hear more about is how Intel plans to bring down the costs of Thunderbolt peripherals; simplified licensing (or doing away with it entirely) would go a long way to improving things and help to stimulate competition. There's no use having ever faster Thunderbolt if we're still stuck with only a fraction of Mac users actually able to afford to switch to it from USB.

It also makes it very hard to buy Thunderbolt 1 or 2 devices today when many don't really fully utilise Thunderbolt speeds anyway, while devices that fully utilise the next Thunderbolt generation may not be that far away. Makes things very difficult to buy into.
 
How fast is the flash in current i devices? Not as fast as SSDs right?

It can go around 25 MB/s max.

For comparison, Macs with flash storage can go up to between 750 and 1200 MB/s depending on the model. So not even close.

Even a 5400RPM mechanical 2.5" hard drive (like those in the old 13" cMBP) can go up to 90MB/s.

The flash storage in iOS devices is really the slowest. It does have better latency than a mechanical drive though, but it's more comparable to memory inside a USB thumb drive or high-end SD card in terms of performance (which is pretty bad).
 
It also makes it very hard to buy Thunderbolt 1 or 2 devices today when many don't really fully utilise Thunderbolt speeds anyway, while devices that fully utilise the next Thunderbolt generation may not be that far away. Makes things very difficult to buy into.

99% of devices can't even take advantage of (ie don't need) the full bandwidth of Thunderbolt 2, so I'm not sure why that would be a big issue. Other than a large RAID array or something, and then you could use multiple ports.
 
God, ANOTHER new connector type! Thunderbolt is so recent, Intel really couldn't foresee a "~3mm" slimmer FINAL and PERMANENT (and why the hell not REVERSIBLE) connector from the get-go?!?! :mad: :confused: :mad:
 
Do you have a source for the claim that Intel forced SilverStone to stop their development? I'm not doubting you, it's just that I've searched and found no reference.

https://www.macrumors.com/2013/07/30/11-macbook-air-owner-connects-high-end-graphics-card-with-complex-thunderbolt-setup/

That's a link to an article about the MacBook Air but I can't find the article regarding Intel blocking that enclosure - think they wouldn't certify it or something. Personally it annoys me as I would love to be able to hook one of my spare GPU's up as I do game and the rMBP is actually very good at it, especially with Nvidia's latest beta driver. I'll keep looking and post it if I can find it.

https://www.google.com/shopping/product/343371908683020134?q=OWC+helios&hl=en&bav

Seems PCI-e expansion enclosures have made it to market!
 
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It may be backward compatible (via adapters), but it'll get a different connector (which imho is bad for a standard that has still not gotten overly wide market acceptance - and sheds a poor light on the long-time planning capabilities of the parties involved).

USB has 6 different connectors as a standard.
 
Neat...

Now, is there any company left that doesn't have leaked info, or are we all good ? :)
 
Can't they just release 1 version and get it over with? All these revisions just make it impossible to take this technology to mainstream adoption. The biggest advantage of USB 2.0 wasn't the technology, it was the fact that it stuck around for over 10 years.

Very good point.
 
You're full of crap, you know that right? If I want to offload a whole bunch of photos off my phone what do you think is the quickest way to do that? How about loading a bunch of new music or media, or — as I did last week — restoring my entire phone from a backup? Wifi? No.
Your views are irrelevant. Apple cares about the 99% usage case, not the 1% with special needs. Hardly anyone uses wires on iPhones anymore and Apple knows it. Arguing about whether this is right or wrong is not relevant either- wire speeds will NOT be a priority for Apple in the future, just as they haven't been in the past.
 
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