Thunderbolt devices are still irritatingly thin on the ground

"No-one is offering a cradle you can put your own drive into."
Maybe I'm thinking of something else but what about those external hard drive enclosures? You just buy a drive and drop it in... or did you mean internally or something?

One thing I find confusing is the stream of noise about how expsensive TB is, whether a cable or a RAID.

I mean, how long have people making these statments been working with computers? $50 for a cable is cheap, $1500 for the fastest throughput RAID below the high end of exotica? These are not expensive items.

How much was a 3m SCSI2 cable?
How much was a BetacamSP digital play/record unit?
How much was a Quantel Harriet?
How much is a Sony Pro HD Camera?
How much is a film quality lens?
How much is a Canon 5DMk2?
How much is a HD broadcast reference monitor with color management attachment and hood?

Oh the humanity, $15000(0) worth of camera/monitor but the $1550 to edit 8 uncompressed streams 6 months after the release of the tech to make it doable is an outrage.

Man up people. The MacPro with dual Fibrechannel cards and 10 disk SAS drive array you needed 5 years ago was not $3,050, maybe $30,000. The dedicated Flame workstation 10 years ago was maybe $100,000 and the Quantel Harriet 15 years ago was maybe $500,000.

Hah and to be a hypocrite, I think LaCie is a "bit" overpriced when you do the performance/cost analysis comapred to Promise.

end rant/

So out of interest what are people wanting to do with thunderbolt that leaves them feeling it is costly? Not professional video work or file serving a 30 person office I take it. Replies...

Running Dual monitors smoothly from my Macbook without an excess of wires and boxes attached is a dream come true for me. Now I have the all power, efficiency, and portability I need from my laptop with the screen real estate normally reserved for desktop solutions. I realize this article is about the lack of peripherals on the market but despite the hefty pay tag there is nothing I love more than the freedom to walk in the door with my laptop from a meeting, plug a single wire in and instantly have enough screen real-estate to compare multiple documents at once while working.

Intel now playing around with the interconnect design: it is almost like they wanted to undermine Apple.

The first problem here is that the author doesn't know what he is talking about. TB was never intended to be a low cost port. TB is fast but you won't really benefit from external GPUs the way some imagine as it is currently too slow for that. Further due to its construction TB daisy chains external devices, this leads to contention which effectively slows the bus when multiple devices need to be serviced.

Now I'm not knocking TB as I believe it has potential. What I'm knocking is people that author these opinions based on little if any solid back ground in engineering or product development. The fact is TB was released less than a year ago, that simply isn't enough time to allow for product conceptualization, engineering and qualification. It could be another year before you see much in the way of high end stuff for TB and much longer for more mainstream devices to hit the market. Even then TB will not set the low cost market on fire for one simple reason, that is the $50 cable. At this point I think Apple is right where they want to be with TB.

Remember, Apple and Intel took a backward step and released the "cheap" copper-only version of Thunderbolt. It was initially supposed to work via fibre-optics. The fact that it is still shockingly expensive makes this move really strange to me.

Are all current Thunderbolt ports compatible with both copper-only and fibre-optic cables / devices?
Are all current Thunderbolt devices compatible with both copper-only and fibre-optic cables?
Will future fibre-optic devices be backwards-compatible with copper-only ports?

This smells like a disaster to me. Imagine spending $1000 on a screen that you could buy elsewhere for $500, only to discover that 6 months later it won't let you daisy-chain to newer fibre-optic devices. Or worse, that Macs and PCs end up completely incompatible with devices intended for either camp.

This isn't smartphone / tablet land where a person's initial investment is a few hundred dollars and a trip to their carrier. Computer interconnects need a thriving ecosystem to survive. Doesn't Apple remember what happened to Firewire? I can't believe they would be so stupid release a new one without at least currying some favour from HP and Dell.

So If I'm reading correctly, and I looked at Sonnets site....there is a way to hookup a PCIe Video card in their external enclosure?? This would be awesome....I'm not sure how it'd work if indeed, I'm getting this right. Would their chassis have a slot or something that holds the card? What about the 6-pin molex that some cards require to run?

Again, simply asking here. If anyone can shed a little light on it, I'd really appreciate it.

Thanks :-)

"Has Thunderbolt arrived as more of a damp fart?"

LOL. Couldn't have said it better. My mini is permantently splayed open to expose the two PCIe busses (CD and Disk) so I can hook external drives to it. I hate this (it's fragile) and really wish I could just move to TB.

Ironically I just had Software Update suggest to install a Thunderbolt Update.

The problem with Thunderbolt is that it fills a niche that just isn't very interesting for hardware vendors. It is very few people that actually do need the bandwidth Thunderbolt offers, so it is just not worth investing in the technology yet.
The only reason I would interested in Thunderbolt would be a true MBP Dockingstation .. extra hard disk, a couple USB ports, Ethernet .. maybe even desktopgrade graphics card .. but 1000$ for a Monitor doesn't seem worth it.

T.