Comments on: 5 Reasons Why Thunderbolt Is a Big Deal (and Why You Should Care)

By: fictionalui

fictionalui — Sun, 08 May 2011 17:17:31 +0000

Nope.
Waiting hopelessly for the successor of FW800 was “yawn”. USB 3 was “yawn” (and btw, there are tons of PCs supporting it already, even some netbook).

Thunderbolt *is* a pretty big deal.
Just re-read point 4: “Basically, anything that can be used with a PCIe expansion slot could work as a Thunderbolt device.”

It’s going to be a single connector for everything: video, audio, USB, FW, ethernet, Expresscard, PCIe up to 4x… it can all be feeded to TB with simple adapters and breakout boxes – which means legacy support for all your existing devices and no need to specific support from devices manufacturers.

And once optical replaces copper for the data wires, bandwidth will progressively scale up to cover your needs for the next ten years at least.

Granted, interconnect evolution won’t freeze and halt here, but in the next few years Thunderbolt is going to have have a pretty big impact in the consumer space, superior to the impact the original USB 1.0 and FW400 had at the end of the 90s.

By: ggore

ggore — Wed, 04 May 2011 10:43:50 +0000

Not that Thunderbolt might actually take off, but didn’t we hear these same predictions years ago regarding Firewire and USB-3, and Firewire is now dead and USB-3, introduced several years ago, has never yet been deployed on any mainstream PC or Mac. I would wager almost any amount of money that by the time any Thunderbolt-capable peripherals are introduced, the PC industry will have moved on to the “next big thing” connector they now have on their drawing boards. This is just one big yawn to me.

By: Jason

Jason — Tue, 03 May 2011 20:10:53 +0000

Agreed! This is the potential i’ve been waiting for, for a long time now.

By: c0nd3mn3d

c0nd3mn3d — Tue, 03 May 2011 19:29:42 +0000

“5 Reasons Thunderbolt is a Big Deal”