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I am not surprised at all, USB 3.0 is dead like BD and optical drives. I think I will hold off on buying the 11" MBA as I am now expecting the next refresh to include light peak and sandy bridge.
 
We were talking about audio interfaces. Any of those with USB3?

Any Apple hardware with USB3?

yeah lots, heres a quality one by the looks of it

http://www.activemusician.com/item--TW.AARU32

theres lots of little junky ones too

http://www.manhattan-products.com/en-US/products/9275-hi-speed-usb-3-d-sound-adapter

(Any chance you could NOT post an enormous picture?)

sorry im just used to 1080p on my 15" screen, no pictures displayed by google images (on default settings) is too big

interesting find though, this article is 2 years old

http://news.cnet.com/8301-11386_3-10141810-76.html?tag=mncol;posts
 
You are plain wrong. There is no need to guesstimate these things anymore. Here are the real test data from anandtech.com:

Windows Performance Comparison
---------------------------------
Seagate GoFlex Desk 3TB (USB 2.0) Seagate GoFlex Desk 3TB (USB 3.0)
Sequential Read 33.1 MB/s 151.9 MB/s
Sequential Write 26.9 MB/s 151.2 MB/s

Mac Performance Comparison - XBench 1.3
-------------------------------------------------
Seagate GoFlex Desk 3TB (USB 2.0) Seagate GoFlex Desk 3TB (FireWire 800)
Sequential Read 17.0 MB/s 74.9 MB/s
Sequential Write 15.8 MB/s 47.6 MB/s

BTW, note how much slower USB 2.0 is on Mac than on Windows which probably explains your confusion about the benefits of FireWire (as in comparing the speeds of USB 2.0 vs FireWire on Macs provides rather skewed picture).

And given that in case of USB 3.0 these speeds may be limited by the drive the speed difference for interfaces might be even more substantial.

So, my random guess without even knowing what USB3 is officially rated at wasn't too far off. It took USB a half-dozen years to beat FW800. Also, being a Mac user, I don't care about Windows specs--it does nothing but leave room to complain.

Note that USB2 is half as fast on a Mac, so if USB3 on the Mac is just as bad, my initial wild guess will be spot-on. :p
 
I am not surprised at all, USB 3.0 is dead like BD and optical drives.

I guess you must mean "alive and kicking" given both of your examples. Blu-Ray is being adopted faster than DVD, guy. Players are now well under $100 (look how long VHS took to get to that point, not even counting inflation! I suppose VHS was "dead" too? Or did you expect nearly 100% of the population to own one overnight or you get to call it dead? If so, then I guess the Mac is "dead" too since more Blu-Ray players and recorders have sold in the past 5 years than the entire history of the Macintosh computer!

In a half-decade with very high early player prices, Blu-Ray now accounts for 15-20% market share of new videos sold. When you consider that to even bother getting Blu-Ray you basically need an HDTV (something that had almost no market share a mere ten years ago) and a pretty decent sized set to "really" notice how bad DVD looks by comparison, it's pretty startling, IMO. Yet you call it "dead". I don't like "disc" formats myself anymore, but pretending that a format is "dead" just because you don't personally own it is ridiculous. It's akin to calling HDTV "dead". There's NOTHING else HD out there to own except the few 720p movies iTunes sells and pirated Blu-Ray conversions off the Internet (those don't count for sales and they need Blu-Ray to even exist themselves).

USB3 will be on nearly all computers by the end of this year (save maybe Apple since they're weird about these types of things) simply because it will cost hardly anything to replace USB 2.0 with USB 3.0 ports and they're 100% backwards compatible.

In short, I see purely fanatical thinking here.

One could argue that long-term streaming subscriptions (like an HD "Netflix") may eventually prove to be a huge player in how people watch HD movies at home, but for those that want to "own" them, paying Apple $20 for low-bit rate 720p seems absurd when the same title is often available in extremely high bit-rate 1080p on Blu-Ray. Even if you want to convert it yourself to store on a hard drive streaming system, buying the higher resolution format for archive purposes at the same price makes sense (again not counting those pirating to get their movies).
 
I guess you must mean "alive and kicking" given both of your examples. Blu-Ray is being adopted faster than DVD, guy. Players are now well under $100 (look how long VHS took to get to that point, not even counting inflation! I suppose VHS was "dead" too? Or did you expect nearly 100% of the population to own one overnight or you get to call it dead? If so, then I guess the Mac is "dead" too since more Blu-Ray players and recorders have sold in the past 5 years than the entire history of the Macintosh computer!

In a half-decade with very high early player prices, Blu-Ray now accounts for 15-20% market share of new videos sold. When you consider that to even bother getting Blu-Ray you basically need an HDTV (something that had almost no market share a mere ten years ago) and a pretty decent sized set to "really" notice how bad DVD looks by comparison, it's pretty startling, IMO. Yet you call it "dead". I don't like "disc" formats myself anymore, but pretending that a format is "dead" just because you don't personally own it is ridiculous. It's akin to calling HDTV "dead". There's NOTHING else HD out there to own except the few 720p movies iTunes sells and pirated Blu-Ray conversions off the Internet (those don't count for sales and they need Blu-Ray to even exist themselves).

USB3 will be on nearly all computers by the end of this year (save maybe Apple since they're weird about these types of things) simply because it will cost hardly anything to replace USB 2.0 with USB 3.0 ports and they're 100% backwards compatible.

In short, I see purely fanatical thinking here.

One could argue that long-term streaming subscriptions (like an HD "Netflix") may eventually prove to be a huge player in how people watch HD movies at home, but for those that want to "own" them, paying Apple $20 for low-bit rate 720p seems absurd when the same title is often available in extremely high bit-rate 1080p on Blu-Ray. Even if you want to convert it yourself to store on a hard drive streaming system, buying the higher resolution format for archive purposes at the same price makes sense (again not counting those pirating to get their movies).

ahh save your breath, linux2mac will just reply saying, streaming is the future bluray and usb3 is dead blah blah blah....... just look at how long the bluray thread is! there are thousands of examples of why BD is the current standard but i guess examples and facts dont mean anything to fanboys, only what jobs throws up onto them....
 
So, my random guess without even knowing what USB3 is officially rated at wasn't too far off. It took USB a half-dozen years to beat FW800. Also, being a Mac user, I don't care about Windows specs--it does nothing but leave room to complain.

Note that USB2 is half as fast on a Mac, so if USB3 on the Mac is just as bad, my initial wild guess will be spot-on. :p

Wow that was interesting to see the read and write of the USB 2.0 speeds on OSX vs Windows. Wonder what the deal is with why it is so slow on OSX? Coding I am guessing.

I honestly do think you will see USB 3.0 by the end of the year in macs IMHO.
 
The other day in ALDI I saw an ad for a Medion notebook computer for $A799 (~$US799) which had USB 3.0. So I can get USB 3.0 in a cheap notebook from a grocery store but not in an $A2699 Macbook Pro :(

Let's hope LightPeak comes in the next MBP update, otherwise I might be going back to Windows / Linux.
 
USB 3.0 is coming to Intel on the Panther Point platform for Ivy Bridge. Otherwise enjoy it everywhere else but Apple, today.
 
I'm waiting for someone to say that on the epic Blu-ray post, scattered among the messages from people saying that BD is dead because we can all download 50 GB movies on a whim. ;)

I'm getting closer. I can download about 9GB per 2 hours now. ;)

Actually, my cable company now offers 30 and 50 Mbit packages now as well for more money. At 50, I could download 45GB in 2 hours. That's pretty much Blu-Ray in real time. :D (and you don't need that compression rate to get perceptible BD quality...not even close really. An 8-12GB file compressed with a high quality encoder would be virtually indistinguishable in most cases).
 
It does not looks like Light Peak is going to be ready any time soon.
At least not sooner than USB 3.0. :rolleyes:

Super Talent is spamming "good enough" USB flash drives for dirt cheap. They are not as fast as the more premium drives but they are a dramatic improvement over USB 2.0 ones.

USB 3.0 controller/platform benchmarks are showing up with the advent of SSDs to tax the bus to the maximum.
 
I'm getting closer. I can download about 9GB per 2 hours now. ;)

Actually, my cable company now offers 30 and 50 Mbit packages now as well for more money. At 50, I could download 45GB in 2 hours. That's pretty much Blu-Ray in real time. :D (and you don't need that compression rate to get perceptible BD quality...not even close really. An 8-12GB file compressed with a high quality encoder would be virtually indistinguishable in most cases).

I've got a speed tier that is 10-15 mbps, in reality it is a solid 4 mbps. I could pay for a faster tier, but I'd probably only get one third of the theoretical top limit of that.

I would love to be able to stream BD quality netflix. Love it. I, however, live in the 4th circle of hell that is known as comcast's monopoly area.


Nice. But I am waiting for LightPeak.


So far that is vaporware to me. What can they do for me today?
 
I've got a speed tier that is 10-15 mbps, in reality it is a solid 4 mbps. I could pay for a faster tier, but I'd probably only get one third of the theoretical top limit of that.

I would love to be able to stream BD quality netflix. Love it. I, however, live in the 4th circle of hell that is known as comcast's monopoly area.

Well, I'm blessed with Cox Cable's blessings. 22Mb/s down and 3Mb/s up with Powerboost to 30Mb/s down.

So yeah, Netflix plays awesomely on Blu-Ray quality. Oh and I only loose like 1 Mb/s in the entire thing due to traffic or other so in reality I see 21Mb/s down.
 
....(and you don't need that compression rate to get perceptible BD quality...not even close really. An 8-12GB file compressed with a high quality encoder would be virtually indistinguishable in most cases).

I LOL at comments like this.

Since most BD movies are H.264 (or roughly equivalent VC-1) encodings, I'm amused that someone can say that a 40 GB H.264 and an 8 GB H.264 file are indistinguishable.

Maybe indistinguishable on a 10 year old SD CRT, but on a 1080p display - I don't think so!

You're taking something that's been compressed to a high degree (even though it's 40 Mbps 1080p), and recompressing it by another factor of 5 or so.

Don't try to tell me it's "indistinguishable". It may be "enjoyable", but it's been damaged by the processing.
 
Well, I'm blessed with Cox Cable's blessings. 22Mb/s down and 3Mb/s up with Powerboost to 30Mb/s down.

So yeah, Netflix plays awesomely on Blu-Ray quality. Oh and I only loose like 1 Mb/s in the entire thing due to traffic or other so in reality I see 21Mb/s down.

Obviously you are not watching Netflix in BluRay quality. Netflix simply does not have such service. Besides, if we all had BluRay capable connections and started watching BR movies I suspect that WWW backbone infrastructure would collapse. We are probably many years aways from such luxury.
 
I LOL at comments like this.

And I laugh at people who try to tell me that there are these "huge" differences when I can even pause Apple's 720p streams and find no visible artifacts (try 4GB). I've seen head-to-head comparisons still of Blu-Ray scaled to 720p against iTunes 720p (like 1/10 the data rate) and there are no differences worth talking about in the stills let alone with motion.

Like high-end audio there is more snake-oil out there than sense. Some people have to claim superiority and some aren't happy unless they paid $2000 for a pair of interconnect cable (worth about $2 in reality), paint their CDs green (when "jitter" was the big thing despite the fact that painting CD edges green has no effect on jitter what-so-ever) spend $10,000 on a DAC that has no audible improvements in double-blind tests against a $10 DAC and generally think their money is better spent on that crap than good quality speakers.

Similarly, I see NO END of claims on these forums by people about Blu-Ray being so vastly superior to things like AppleTV and the like while 95% of those people are viewing their "HD" on 46"-60" sets at 12-20 feet away where the effects of even the believable claims (i.e. 1080p VS 720p) are not only dubious, but outright nonsense. Most of these people are not seeing 1080p on their 1080p sets because of the resolving distance problem (actual science), but that won't stop them from making a CLAIM that they can. Some people will never be happy until they can get 100% uncompressed HD sources. I'm sure there will eventually be some company that takes the new Super Blu-Ray discs and puts 1080p uncompressed on them instead of 4080p compressed and sells the movies for $100 a pop (like some laserdiscs used to sell for) and these people will run around screaming on here about how mind-blowing uncompressed 1080p is on their 100 movie collection while I'll have access to virtually every movie ever made straight off the Internet at more than reasonable HD quality.

Since most BD movies are H.264 (or roughly equivalent VC-1) encodings, I'm amused that someone can say that a 40 GB H.264 and an 8 GB H.264 file are indistinguishable.

Well, I'm pretty sure I can take a 20 meg uncompressed snapshot and apply 90% JPEG and end up with a nice 2meg file that looks nearly indistinguishable (or at least without a direct microscopic comparison to the original) to most people's eyes, but you could set it to 99% instead and end up with a 10 meg file and tell me you're amused that someone could say a 2meg file could look the same as a 10meg file when they're compressed with the same format and I would laugh in their face because they so freaking missed the point.... It's called OVERKILL dude. Look into it. :p

Blu-Ray uses overkill because it CAN not because it NEEDS it. They space is wasted if not filled on that aluminum-plastic disc so why not use as little compression as possible? That doesn't automatically mean you can see the difference if more compression is used. Double-Blind testing methods are needed to prove differences, not conjecture.

Maybe indistinguishable on a 10 year old SD CRT, but on a 1080p display - I don't think so!

The thing is that I don't care what you think. Your opinion is irrelevant to observable reality. If I watch an HD movie and I see no noticeable/visible artifacting (especially during fast motion affecting large parts of the picture), I'm generally pretty pleased. I picture you sitting there watching Blu-Ray and trying to spot the slightest hint of pixelization or dither in the background sky and wishing as hard as you can that some day you can get a fully uncompressed HD signal to replace your BD movies with ones that you KNOW don't have any artifacts rather than simply relying on your senses to tell you. ;)

You're taking something that's been compressed to a high degree (even though it's 40 Mbps 1080p), and recompressing it by another factor of 5 or so.

I'm not re-compressing anything. iTunes movies (whether rentals or purchases) aren't taken from BD discs, unlike pirated movies off the Internet.


Don't try to tell me it's "indistinguishable". It may be "enjoyable", but it's been damaged by the processing.

Why would I want to tell you anything? You're clearly irrational and brain-washed to think that "more" must be better. You would probably therefore want to argue that audio will sound better if recorded at 24-bit/128kHz compared to say 18-bit/48kHz. I dare say there is no audible difference there either (EVER) since it's overkill (beyond human range of hearing). There are recording reasons to use such things, but no reason what-so-ever to use it on playback. That doesn't ever stop "audiophiles" from making such claims (they liked to make ridiculous claims about vinyl as well). The problem comes in when they're asked to prove those claims in a double-blind test. There's always some excuse or claim about a flawed testing method when they utterly fail to be able to detect the differences between cables, DACs, high-bit recordings, a CD-R recording of a vinyl record from an actual vinyl record, etc. etc. etc.

Likewise, "too much compression" only exists in video if the results are actually visible and only a real problem is they're noticeably so. Conjecture on your part doesn't alter reality. Show me some double-blind tests that show that you can reliably tell an 12GB 1080p movie from a 50GB 1080p movie. I don't believe you can and I resent the arrogant attitude about it. Now go ahead and brag about your 1080p 42" TV and how you can easily see the difference when sitting 20 feet away (or maybe you prefer to sit 4 feet away where you can actually see 1080p from 720p?) :D

Your definition of "damaged" would also have to include Blu-Ray since it's compressed as well. Like I said, good luck waiting for uncompressed movies to become available. Something tells me you won't be happy until they do. :rolleyes:
 
Obviously you are not watching Netflix in BluRay quality. Netflix simply does not have such service. Besides, if we all had BluRay capable connections and started watching BR movies I suspect that WWW backbone infrastructure would collapse. We are probably many years aways from such luxury.

Whatever Netflix calls it is up to them. I just know I get the highest quality Netflix has. Does it collapse the Backbones? No...
 
Obviously you are not watching Netflix in BluRay quality. Netflix simply does not have such service. Besides, if we all had BluRay capable connections and started watching BR movies I suspect that WWW backbone infrastructure would collapse. We are probably many years aways from such luxury.

*SIGH* I am in the BD thread.

Here is 1080p streaming for those interested.

http://www.vudu.com/product_hdx.html

http://shop.roku.com/Roku-Streaming-Player-Options-W5.aspx

And don't forget PS3 has 1080p Netflix streaming too.
 
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And I laugh at people who try to tell me that there are these "huge" differences when I can even pause Apple's 720p streams and find no visible artifacts (try 4GB). I've seen head-to-head comparisons still of Blu-Ray scaled to 720p against iTunes 720p (like 1/10 the data rate) and there are no differences worth talking about in the stills let alone with motion.
If you're saying there's no visible difference between 1080p on a Blu-ray disc and 720p streaming from Netflix, AppleTV, etc. when viewed on quality equipment... then you have poor vision. The difference is immediately visible to me. I think a crack-smoking hobo might agree with you, but I have never used mind-altering drugs for entertainment.
 
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