You're far too caught up in bandwidth alone. Not that Usb has better bandwidth than thunderbolt anyway.
Usb and Thunderbolt can co-exist together. As people have pointed out multiple times in this thread, both have their advantages, and disadvantages.
Some of the advantages of Thunderbolt include it's latency, it's lower overhead, the fact that it's a PCIe signal outside of the box, complete with displayport all going over one cable that can be daisy-chained work in it's favour. I understand you may not have any use for this, but other people do.
Of course they can co-exist. The question is will this be beneficial for most users in the future. If high quality device makers focus on higher priced devices, the gap between "high grade" and "consumer grade" will be wider. In many fields we already see a problem, that consumer devices are dirt cheap, but if you want even a little bit more quality, you'll have to pay 10x or more. To get best of both worlds we need to have good quality with good prices and especially with huge volumes.
GMAFB, if you want to start bringing in 3rd party accessories that's one thing, but USB does NOT have optical capability built in. It's not in the spec. Optical interconnect has been part of the thunderbolt spec since it was created.
I suppose the same could be said for almost any industry as technology advances. SLR's sure have been getting easier to use these days; you don't even have to spend days in a darkroom anymore. Have Canon and Nikon abandoned their pro users by making photography easier?
Your arguments are based on emotion and not logic.
No, my arguments are based on a very simply logics.
Macs would be better & cheaper (for most users) without TB. Then macs would always have the latest gen DP and Apple would have to focus more on making usb3 work better. Now macs have way more interoperability problems with usb3 than other computers.
Also if device makers would focus on making usb3/3.1 connected high quality devices, they would become a whole lot cheaper than TB devices will ever get with same quality level. Just simple economics of scale.
And no, optical interconnect is not in TB specs and has never been. "Light port" prototypes used optical cables, but now "the optical TB cable" will be strictly "3rd party accessories" (Corning & Sumimoto). Even those are not yet on the market and it is not sure at all that they will be on market a long time. Well, same thing conserns all TB products...
SLRs are very good example on how offering same tech for consumers and pros makes prices lower. For example canon's EF zooms would be multiple times more expensive, if they were used only by pros. Just check out the price for similiar professional video or cinema lenses.
Image
http://www.avid.com/US/products/Pro-Tools-HD-native#hd_native
Something useful that's not a hard drive. You can use it with a laptop. I don't see that available for USB.
External PCI has enabled using normal pci cards with laptops a long time.
So, in that sense TB offers nothing new. But if TB would have been made cheap & widely used in industry, it could have became a whole lot cheaper than external pci, which remained to be expensive niche.
(Btw, funny that Avid doesn't publish TB latency. Or is it really same than with internal pci card? Latency chart also tells how "horrible" the latency with usb is. Fw has been told to be way better than usb and that's why users still want to use their fw devices. Usb2 latency is 7ms, fw 5ms and pcie is 1-3ms. I'd guess that usb3 latency is on same level than fw and usb3.1 will be even better. So actually the latency differences might be about 1ms. Is this so very important for so many?)
No it is like saying that a Ferrari (Thunderbolt) is useless to me because I can not afford one. I have gained zero benefit from having a thunderbolt port. And I would venture to guess that is what 99% of mac users would say.
For most mac users TB is more like saying that you need Ferrari to drive 65mph. I'm not arguing that you can't drive 65mph with Ferrari, but most people are happy that they don't need Ferrari for that, since they couldn't afford it.
I'd guess that the ratio is that about 1% really need TB, 4% like to use it, even it's not mandatory for them and 95% does not use it at all or use it just like DP/fw/usb port.
Again maybe most of that 1% would be just fine with workstation with storage and pcie cards inside. So TB becomes a must for them only because Apple didn't care about MP for so long and killed expansion from laptops by removing EC slot. Those pros that really can benefit from carrying 5 small boxes instead of one big box have to be very small group. Same thing for those who really need power, but can't afford a desktop workstation and therefore can use their laptop "like desktop workstation" with TB.
When im thirsty, i want a bottle of water now
