How useful is Thunderbolt?

[philipma1957]

Now, this might be a very stupid question, but:

If what Hellhammer says "Thunderbolt is essentially just PCIe port" is true, then we could see EXTERNAL graphic cards in the future? So you would have an MBA with crappy IGP, a thunderbolt connection to a graphics card in a separate housing, and then a thunderbolt connection to your ACD 27"?

If that's possible, I think the market could be quite big for such external graphics cards, no? Not as popular as external drives, but still something that would be bought by quite a few.

Does anybody think, we'll see such cards within the next year?

more like two to three years.

http://www.sonnettech.com/news/nab2011/


the echo express is the unit and it comes out this year near the bottom of the link page. I think the issue of 1 t-bolt not giving a good enough bandwidth for a good gpu card will be solved in two or three years. one way is making a Mac with 3 or more t-bolt ports or making your airbook with all t-bolt ports. then you could use two connections to the echo express.. Also if they make these light based the bandwidth will be greater.

This would sell big with mac mini's and may finally allow good gaming on all macs.

 

[PraisiX-windows]

I'm not talking about gaming (and if I were to visit a lan party I probably wouldn't use my MacBook Air for gaming, unless it was an old game like Counter Strike or Battlefield 1942).

But there's plenty of other stuff going on at LAN parties where a gigabit ethernet port would be very handy indeed.

I would like to note that what GekkePrutser refers to as "other stuff" has got nothing to do with anything illegal.
There's no such thing as piracy going on at LAN parties.

- I do however wonder what those "other stuff" could refer to though, all I ever have tried at LAN parties was throwing old hardware around, chucking cola and cocio and played games, (again note, no such thing as piracy, we're geeks not pirates.)

 

[Cerano]

FireWire is definitely not crap or abandoned; it's a niche product now, but definitely in use. USB 3 isn't that well established, either. I'd certainly like the more versatile Thunderbolt to win that race, but we'll just have to see.

they dont make anything for firewire anymore. thats why apple abandoned it

 

[tbobmccoy]

they dont make anything for firewire anymore. thats why apple abandoned it

Except hard drives, video capture devices, analog to digital converters... You should really look into hard drives though, since the others are specialized niche uses. My FW800 HDD smokes external USB 2.0 drives.

Apple didn't abandon FW800, or it wouldn't still be in their 2011 models. Lots of people were up in arms back when they tried to pull the FW800 port from the MacBook 13" unibody, and they later put it back in and rebranded it the MacBook Pro 13".

 

[Cerano]

Except hard drives, video capture devices, analog to digital converters... You should really look into hard drives though, since the others are specialized niche uses. My FW800 HDD smokes external USB 2.0 drives.

Apple didn't abandon FW800, or it wouldn't still be in their 2011 models. Lots of people were up in arms back when they tried to pull the FW800 port from the MacBook 13" unibody, and they later put it back in and rebranded it the MacBook Pro 13".

well apple has always been pretty deviant eg the rejection of mdvi or dvi or vga for mdp