riopato

January 17, 2012 at 5:52am

So far Thunderbolt is as worth it as it's peripherals are. What peripherals you ask?

Is this going to be another ieee1394 aka firewire port that just collects dust? Is Apple's involvement jacking up the price of this port again? Or will radioshack be the only store that sells lightpeak cables 3 years from now.

TheMiddleman

January 16, 2012 at 5:18pm

"Acer's Aspire S5, claimed to be the world's thinnest Ultrabook, sports a 20Gbps Thunderbolt port and will ship in the second quarter of 2012"

Who gives a damn? The problem isn't hardware carrying the port, but rather peripherals. It wasn't until external hard drives equipped with USB 3.0 ports reached price parity with USB 2.0 equipped models that I finally purchased one, which necessitated the purchase and installation of a USB 3.0 PCIe card. As of right now, The cheapest thunderbolt-packing peripheral is a penny shy of 300 bucks, which places it squarely in the realm of niche market, just like Firewire 800.

t.y.wan

January 16, 2012 at 3:53pm

$10 "premium" is nothing, but in the world of peripherals, it's completely stupid, the thunderbolt / lightpeak / mini-displayport compatible port thingy on any device is soooooo expensive, seriously, what the hell is wrong with these people.

That said, it could be useful, if only, the peripherals aren't insanely expensive.

Crunch

January 16, 2012 at 3:32pm

 

As someone who has had the privilege of working (and playing!) with SATA III SSD's (2x120GB OWC Mercury EXTREME Pro 6G), RAID'ed together for speeds of around 900MB/s to 1GB/s, consistently, super stable, every single time, Thunderbolt is a beautiful thing. And being able to fire 10+GB files through my Thunderbolt cable in 15-25 seconds, depending on file compression, but NOT depending on what else is going on in the Thunderbolt chain, as the SAME cable routes video to my 2560x1440 27" monitor by way of an AMD Radeon HD 6770M card.

Thunderbolt is much more than blistering speeds and running multiple 1080p HD streams through a single connection, though. It will make a dent into the laptop universe when you can basically buy a super-thin "Ultrabook" and extend PCI Express over a single cable which will give you every connection available under the sun, depending on the dock you choose. Those are not quite available unless the dock you speak of lives in Apple's 27" Thunderbolt display, which I was NOT referring to above. My monitor is also 27" with the same high resolution but is DisplayPort-based and there is yet another benefit to Thunderbolt. You can use your current equipment with Thunderbolt. For example, my Epson HD projector runs beautifully when hooked up via HDMI on one end and a miniDisplayPort-to-HDMI adapter on the other, plugged into the 2nd Thunderbolt port of my RAID array, which is, in turn, plugged into my laptop's Thunderbolt port.

Perhaps the most impressive part of Thunderbolt technology to me is how all of this works incredibly seamlessly and effortlessly to the naked eye. Hot-swapping high-bandwidth peripherals without rebooting or driver installation never crashes anything. It doesn't even slow anything down. I'd like to see USB 3.0 pull any of that off. With that said, if all you need is higher file transfer speeds, I'd say go with USB 3.0 if you have to choose between the two.

 

Engelsstaub

January 16, 2012 at 3:14pm

I don't think TB is aimed to replace any existing standards. It's meant to be for "high-end" users who work with AV and stuff.

Would like to see the prices come down. Since it's pretty much only on Macs at the mo, vendors are going to do their best to charge ridiculous prices. That's why I'm glad it's finally going to hit some PCs.

I still use eSata and FireWire as well as USB. Usually just USB for normal usage though.

acidic

January 16, 2012 at 2:29pm

since apple products have already jumped on the bandwagon, we all know that it will become standard on many devices soon. you gotta be hip to have the latest and greatest thing

kixofmyg0t

January 16, 2012 at 1:49pm

Im more towards USB 3.0. But anything is better than USB 2.0. In fact I spent the extra money to get my 2TB RAID 0 external with a eSATA port cuz USB 2.0 is mind numbingly slow. 

ashinms

January 16, 2012 at 1:04pm

I really want to see something like thunderbolt succeed, but the fact that it's a proprietary technology doesn't exactly make me all happy in the pants.

HiGHRoLLeR038

January 16, 2012 at 10:19am

who cares if two new laptops are sporting thunderbolt ports?  i have not heard of any peripheral devices that have this interface yet.  it would only be beneficial if we started seeing external hard drives with it.  whats the point of having the interface on laptops if there arent any periphs to connect? lol

Digital-Storm

January 16, 2012 at 10:14am

First time I heard about Thunderbolt, I knew it would fail.

AETAaAS

January 16, 2012 at 10:17am

Unless they really milk the AV capabilities of Thunderbolt, I don't think there is much point to it. While it is faster than USB 3.0, a lot of current devices (in particular flash drives) don't even saturate USB 2.0, let alone the keyboards, mice and printers we find plugged in. Given the backward compatibility with a huge catalogue of devices past, present and future, USB is here to stay.

Also, pricing doesn't end at the 10 dollars it adds to the mobo... You are probably going to have to fork out an 'Apple' price for peripherals. A cursory search of Google shows that a 2TB Thunderbolt external drive from Lacie costs 3 times more than the USB 3.0 model (£460 vs £160).

AntonioGarrison

January 16, 2012 at 9:49am

It's like the new Firewire.  USB is a standard port on computers and is inexpensive. As long as they keep making USB upgrades, and making them backwards compatible all will be well.  Even if they come up with another standard port that replaces USB, it'll take another 10 years or more replace it.  I'm not worried. 

 

10$ compared to .10 cents is a BIG difference in cost though.  Don't see this being picked up fully until the price comes down, but it'll probably be implemented into some of the higher end motherboards.