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Author Topic: Positive Thunderbolt thread  (Read 44383 times)

mediumcool

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Re: Positive Thunderbolt thread
« Reply #20 on: September 19, 2011, 12:33:07 am »

First Look: Apple Thunderbolt Display
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Steve Weldon

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Re: Positive Thunderbolt thread
« Reply #21 on: September 19, 2011, 03:22:16 am »

No more, Steve; I find you far too aggressive.
I apologize for not meeting your expectations.
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Steve Weldon

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Re: Positive Thunderbolt thread
« Reply #22 on: September 19, 2011, 03:26:51 am »


Steve, save your money and stick with windows, let morons like myself test out Macs, Iphones, Imacs, MB Pros, Ipads, Leopards, Snow Leopards, Lions, etc.   I'm trying to love Apple products, however their proprietary BS, I can't take an extra battery for my MB Pro and very difficult upgrade path (Hard Drive replacement in Imac is a NIGHTMARE) sickens me!  I do agree, their products are stylish, does that matter? 

Ps,  Can Thunderbolt be "negative" ?  



a.  I truly want to try the OSx platform.  Every time I get close, Apple does something significant to throw me off.  Sad.  I'm considering a Hackintosh project.  Love my ipod..

b.  Apparently.
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mediumcool

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Re: Positive Thunderbolt thread
« Reply #23 on: September 19, 2011, 08:10:23 am »

More devices from more vendors.
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mediumcool

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K.C.

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Re: Positive Thunderbolt thread
« Reply #25 on: September 21, 2011, 12:31:22 am »

LaCie is the BOSE of peripherals. Lots of marketing, looks good on the outside, cheapest possible components on the inside. In 25+ years as an IT manager I've seen about 30% failure rate in LaCie external drives, and it's the power supplies and bridge/controller that fails, not the HD. So won't be touching their TB drives.
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mediumcool

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Re: Positive Thunderbolt thread
« Reply #26 on: September 21, 2011, 03:19:37 am »

LaCie is the BOSE of peripherals. Lots of marketing, looks good on the outside, cheapest possible components on the inside. In 25+ years as an IT manager I've seen about 30% failure rate in LaCie external drives, and it's the power supplies and bridge/controller that fails, not the HD. So won't be touching their TB drives.

Noted.
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mediumcool

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Re: Positive Thunderbolt thread
« Reply #27 on: September 22, 2011, 09:46:07 pm »

PC Mag reviews the Apple Thunderbolt Display.
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mediumcool

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Re: Positive Thunderbolt thread
« Reply #28 on: September 24, 2011, 09:30:56 am »

AnandTech’s take on the Thunderbolt Display.

Quote
Connect a MacBook Air to a Thunderbolt Display and not only do you get more pixels, but you get more connectivity. Gigabit Ethernet and FireWire 800 are now retrofitted to the MacBook Air. For those notebook-as-a-desktop users who migrated from old MacBook Pros to the 13-inch MacBook Air, the Thunderbolt Display is a must-have. The biggest feature for me is Gigabit Ethernet. For large file transfers 802.11n just doesn't cut it.

Anand Lal Shimpi
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Raw shooter

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Re: Positive Thunderbolt thread
« Reply #29 on: September 24, 2011, 10:28:05 am »

Bizarre thread? Agenda vs. Tenaciousness.  Agenda apparently wins.
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mediumcool

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Re: Positive Thunderbolt thread
« Reply #30 on: September 24, 2011, 11:24:53 am »

Bizarre thread? Agenda vs. Tenaciousness.  Agenda apparently wins.

My agenda as you describe it, Raw shooter, is to talk about TB products that are shipping or that will be available soon (that is, not next year), and which may be useful for certain workflows. Carrying on about USB 3.0 as a rival (it ain’t particularly) or as some sort of combo with TB (politically and technically way out of line), and denigration of a particular comcomitant computer platform are the reasons why I deliberately put *positive* in the title. See other thread. Incidentally, I cannot use Thunderbolt technology until I upgrade two computers, but will do so for the twin advantages of reduction of cabling as much as the speed potential; aren’t you excited by the potential of 900MB/second to and from a laptop? I am.

I search every few days to see what’s happening, but a lot of the hits are old; I try to link to fresh news, as that will be more current, by any definition. BTW, have you read the AnandTech review? Astonishingly detailed, as they tend to be, but not without criticism and caveat.

Got anything positive to report about Thunderbolt hardware, yerself? No?  ;)

And I regret that I do not understand your *Agenda vs. Tenaciousness* phrase.
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Kenneth Sky

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Re: Positive Thunderbolt thread
« Reply #31 on: September 24, 2011, 12:20:56 pm »

Why not create a list of TB peripherals that will be available by the end of the year? I'm certainly having a hard time finding anything other than a monitor and external hard drives. I'd like to believe that card readers, printers & scanners will become available.
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JBerardi

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Re: Positive Thunderbolt thread
« Reply #32 on: September 24, 2011, 12:48:28 pm »

I'd like to believe that card readers, printers & scanners will become available.

From what I've seen in the early going, it's more likely you'll be plugging your USB, Firewire, eSATA, PCI, etc devices into some kind of Thunderbolt based hub which then needs only a single connection to your computer. I like the concept; how widely accepted in the market remains to be seen.
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mediumcool

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Re: Positive Thunderbolt thread
« Reply #33 on: September 24, 2011, 01:15:56 pm »

Why not create a list of TB peripherals that will be available by the end of the year? I'm certainly having a hard time finding anything other than a monitor and external hard drives. I'd like to believe that card readers, printers & scanners will become available.

Kenneth, thanks for the question.

But are you asking me to do this, or is your question simply rhetorical? I have no more access to information than you (probably less access since my wireless broadband quota this month is used up and my service is now throttled to 64Kbps  :(  and FWIW I live in Australia, a lonnnnnnng commute from California); as I said in the previous post, I search every few days using Google. You could do the same, I assume.

It seems obvious to me that a number of vendors/manufacturers are waiting for [to use another poster’s favoured noun] traction, before committing to production and distribution of peripherals while the market is currently Mac-only, and therefore limited in volume; historically, many PC vendors have not had, or have been unwilling to acquire, the chops to write drivers for OSX. (What is great about TB itself is that computers grok it as PCI-E, without any mucking about. So far.)

Your mention of printers and scanners is particularly interesting; I hadn’t thought much about these at all in this context. Firstly, printers: with wide-format devices in particular, the ability to push millions of bits quickly across an interface is superficially attractive, but I wonder if that is sufficient to offset (no pun intended!) the slowness of printer heads squirting their way across great widths of paper. Balance is important; not much point having a system fast in one area, but slow in another.

Second: high rez scanners are specialist devices—here I am talking about large flatbed and film scanners; I have never found SCSI or USB2 to be much of a speed impediment on an A4 scanner when working at reasonable resolutions.

You have also possibly forgotten the extension chassis that were mentioned in a previous post; Marathon has been making these for years, and Sonnet has joined in. Also in that link were pro video adapters and other devices.

But the next post made to this thread as I was writing this is especially cogent: to save rampant cable spaghetti, other connection protocols will be attached via a hub, of which the Thunderbolt Display is the first to market. Sonnet has announced one too, but without the 27" IPS display!

It’s early days, and while TB may never be as omnipresent as USB, that’s fine with me. USB can connect through Thunderbolt, a much higher-end specification, but the reverse will not apply.

« Last Edit: September 24, 2011, 01:19:40 pm by mediumcool »
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mediumcool

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Re: Positive Thunderbolt thread
« Reply #34 on: September 24, 2011, 01:52:47 pm »

From what I've seen in the early going, it's more likely you'll be plugging your USB, Firewire, eSATA, PCI, etc devices into some kind of Thunderbolt based hub which then needs only a single connection to your computer. I like the concept; how widely accepted in the market remains to be seen.

Quite right, of course. The TB Display is the first hub to market, as far as I know, beating even Sonnet’s offering, previously linked to. I found the AnandTech story the single most informative piece about Thunderbolt I have read, and learned quite a lot. The stupid direction Sony went in with their implementation of TB over USB is easier to put into perspective after reading the more techy info about the interface, bus, and cabling, for instance. And gigabit EtherNet? Excellent!

What has not been spoken of is the support for Thunderbolt by OSes and hardware on the PC side. I have searched repeatedly to see if Win7 supports Thunderbolt, and have found zero references to Linux support. Perhaps somebody can elucidate. I did find a vague link about Gigabyte logic boards supporting TB down the track. Are PC assemblers waiting for Ivy Ridge, rather than whacking in Eagle Ridge or Light Ridge sub-assemblies? Dunno; or is everybody waiting for Microsoft to incorporate support in Win8? Apple has long had the advantage of a much smaller ecosystem to test and deploy hardware.

Another bit of information from AnandTech was about the Thunderbolt controllers Apple is using; they are separate sub-assemblies (Eagle Ridge and Light Ridge), one apparent reason for the extremely compact MBA using a smaller, and less able part (Eagle Ridge). So why are PC makers not incorporating these right now? It could be that Intel can supply Apple’s relatively modest requirements without strain, or it could be that Apple is further along the curve, due to developing the copper implementation with Intel. Not enough info, even with the intel conference recently.
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mediumcool

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Re: Positive Thunderbolt thread
« Reply #35 on: September 24, 2011, 01:55:41 pm »

Too many Ridges really.  ;D
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Farmer

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Re: Positive Thunderbolt thread
« Reply #36 on: September 24, 2011, 11:53:42 pm »

With regard to printers, they're not waiting for data at current connection speeds, so increasing data speeds won't improve print times.
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Phil Brown

mediumcool

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Re: Positive Thunderbolt thread
« Reply #37 on: September 25, 2011, 10:58:12 am »



The physical connector used for Thunderbolt (née LightPeak), Mini DisplayPort.
You can see that MDP is narrower than the USB connector, a useful trait for deployment in small laptops. For those who haven’t seen it in the “flesh”, it is a very small connector, but not fragile. According to Wikipedia, a number of manufacturers in additionto  Apple have adopted MDP:

HP announced Envy 14 and Envy 17 notebooks with Mini DisplayPort [5 May 2010]
Dell announced XPS 14, 15, and 17 notebooks with Mini DisplayPort [20 October 2010]
Apple and Intel announced an enhancement of the Mini DisplayPort specification with Intel's Thunderbolt technology, which had been developed under the name Light Peak [24 February 2011]
Lenovo announced ThinkPad X1 notebook with Mini DisplayPort [17 May 2011]

I use a Mini DisplayPort-to-DVI adapter to run a Dell 2410 from my 13" MBP.
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Kenneth Sky

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Re: Positive Thunderbolt thread
« Reply #38 on: September 25, 2011, 01:35:26 pm »

My big disappointment is there are no card readers using TB. It would certainly reduce the wait time transferring data from camera to storage or post processing.
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mediumcool

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Re: Positive Thunderbolt thread
« Reply #39 on: September 25, 2011, 02:06:56 pm »

My big disappointment is there are no card readers using TB. It would certainly reduce the wait time transferring data from camera to storage or post processing.

I’m confident that they will come. I have a FW800 reader for my Aptus files and it would be nice if it was a bit faster, but I can live with it.

Are you a Mac or Win user? I still haven’t found any info about TB adoption on the Dark Side (Star Wars humour), and as far as response to my request for info from other members, it’s <sound>[crickets]</sound>.

Is it MS, or timid vendors?

 :)
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