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.