Thunderbolt? What's the Big Deal?
A new line of MacBooks was recently released at Apple's February 2011 event. I think it's safe to say that there were no cosmetic changes applied. In fact, the entire update was focused on faster hardware. That means faster graphics, faster processors and faster... data transfer? That's right. Thunderbolt, also known at Intel as Light Peak is a new consumer technology that, for those of you less geeky folk, does the same thing as USB cords do for your cameras, iPods and external drives. What's the catch? It's over 20x faster. The Thunderbolt system, which can transfer up to 10GB per second, trumps the current standard, USB 2.0 which can only transfer 450MB per second. That's quite a significant difference.
So what's the big deal? Why is Apple even bothering to include this technology when USB is still the standard? It's part of Apple's Job to be the innovator. They're taking a small risk to change the way users transfer data. Soon, we won't just see iPod cables that are transferring entire libraries in under a minute. I think that within just under two years there will be a full line of affordable Thunderbolt compatible devices. That's all you need to spark a revolution. But first, they'll have to add Thunderbolt to all of their other machines. I wonder why they waited...
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Question:
What do you think about Thunderbolt?
Chris Thurber Feb 27, 2011 at 1:45 AM
Reader Comments (5)
While i am impressed by the theoretical speed of 10 gb/s, the key word is theoretical. Until there is a significant number of peripherals and computers supporting this hardware, it is useless and insignificant that the mac has it. Apple cannot be called "innovators" for merely including an emerging technology in there product. Also, I've heard Nikon will be the first to use light peak, the only problem; the speed of camera memory cards on the market top out at about 150 mb/s and theoretically we will see cards with 500 mb/s soon. But even if these cards do increase in size, they still are very pricey and will not even come close to the 10 gb/s. So no matter how fast light peak is, peripherals will be for the most part, much slower. Also, USB 3.0 is a viable alternative that should not be overlooked. Although it is slower, it allows more devices to be linked together which is very important in a business environment. I'm saddened by Intel's slow adoption of the standard.
Not only this now but USB 3.0 is still not fully out yet and do have not many peripherals devices so thunderbolt will take more than a couple years to start off.
Hi there ... About the data transfer speed ...
Just a quick note, its actually 10 gbps NOT 10 GB/s there is a big difference :) - Check it out.
@Mac Genius haha yeah I was wondering about that. I'm a geek to a certain extent but I didn't mean to misinform for which I apologize. Thanks for the correction!
I get the impression that Apple are trying to bypass USB 3.0. There must be something they know which we don't. A reason why they are effectively jumping a step in the data transfer timeline. As it see it it should go:
USB 1.0, USB 2.0, USB3.0, Thunderbolt.
It's a natural progression which Apple seem to want to fast-forward.