Why Thunderbolt Is Dead In the Water 568
adeelarshad82 writes "In the same way that Apple championed FireWire for the replacement of parallel SCSI, Thunderbolt is meant as the next big thing in video and audio peripheral interfaces. Plus, it's Apple's move to beat USB 3.0. However, Thunderbolt is off to a slow start, for a number of reasons — from cost to the technology's features in comparison to USB 3.0 — which is why it may be dead in the water."
Article reads like a big Apple bash (Score:3, Interesting)
The article reads like a big Apple bash, even though Thunderbolt is Intel's tech. The points about cost are probably valid but the whole thing comes off as a big unsourced bitchfest.
Re:Bullshit. (Score:5, Interesting)
No it won't. USB will be the next USB. The connector is too common now to ever be replaced as the default digital interface for most things. It's on the front of my car radio, for damn sake.
A good parallel is the 3.5mm headphone jack. Frankly, it's stupidly large and poorly designed for what it needs to do (USB isn't). But it will never be replaced by another (wired) connector in it's application space. There's just too many of them, and it's hard to make a compelling case for replacement for 98% of users.
That is a bad analogy. The 3.5mm jack is easy to use because there is no wrong way to plug it in. Now the USB connector on the other hand is crap because a lot of people probably have to make two or three tries before then can plug something in. It is a really poor design which is only marginally better than those stupid PS/2 keyboard/mouse ports.
Now the Thunderbolt connector, on the other hand, has just one right way that you can try to even plug it in. It is easy to see which side is up.
Re:Really? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Excuse me? (Score:2, Interesting)
Scanners?
Yes--my particular area of specialty. 300x300dpi x 24 bits x 8.5x11 x 130 pages x 2 sides / minute = 875Mb/s of actual data. You have to compress that a decent amount to shove it down a USB 2.0 pipe. (Especially considering that these scanners' protocols were typically designed ages ago for SCSI and slower models, and fall about 15% short of USB's actual max ~300Mb/s throughput by virtue of back-and-forth comms with transfer sizes that are not all that large.) Anyway, I'd really like to get the raw data and be able to compress as I want, rather than have the scanner subject it to lossy JPEG on the way out...
Now granted, USB 3.0 should be able to handle that no problem, but at what burden on the CPU? It's a challenge to keep up with a data firehose like that already, without having the CPU micro-managing (harhar) every byte of transfer...
I just hope you're wrong about driving the cost of Thunderbolt down through volume. Apple is obviously not repeating the mistake that really killed Firewire, demanding too-high royalties for its use (not entirely Apple's doing of course since there was a consortium). Intel will be providing chip sets with support for this, and I expect not gouging for it relative to USB.
Re:Really? (Score:3, Interesting)
USB 3 offers no advantages over eSATA
The power is in the connector.
Everything has a USB port.
Therefore it Just Works.
Re:Really? (Score:2, Interesting)
USB 3 offers no advantages over eSATA
Dunno about your system but when I plug in a USB 3.0 drive I can use it almost immediately. If I plug in an eSATA drive I not only have to reboot, my motherboard likes to SUBSTITUTE the new drive for one of my original SATAs.
I submit that is one hell of an advantage USB 3.0 has over eSATA.
Re:Really? (Score:4, Interesting)
USB 3 offers no advantages over eSATA
Did they deprecate hubs in the USB3 spec?