At Last – Thunderbolt Devices Available And A Cable
When Light Peak which became known as Thunderbolt finally saw light of day in the Apple MacBook Pro and other Apple computers as a copper based cable data transmission instead of the optical version which was the original method of transfer of data, it seems that may be the cost of producing that technology optically was too high to be able to successfully include it in the first of the Thunderbolt enabled devices. We have also seen that when at the same time the Pegasus R4 and R6 raid devices came out, that Apple gave us the Apple Thunderbolt Cable which also has a price tag which could be seen as more expensive than it should have been. As it has turned out the cable requires chips at either end of the cable. There are six Thunderbolt chips at either end of the cable and this is probably the reason why the cable, which is an active cable because of those chips and the firmware that is part of that technology, being so expensive.
USB3 has also had problems in coming to the market, it seems to have been a long time in development and has been slow to arrive on the market. It possibly was held back somewhat by Intel, as Intel had the competing technology of Thunderbolt which it wanted to get onto the market first before USB3 was able to dominate.
So now that there are Thunderbolt devices available and there are also USB3 devices arriving in the market, there will be a race to see which of these competing technologies will be the winner for ubiquity and a place on the desktop of computer users. One would hope that Apple and Intel together will be able to bring the better technology which is Thunderbolt to the masses, rather than USB3 which is slower in operation and do better than Apple did with FireWire.
As things stand right now, it is early days in this race to see which of the two data transfer technologies will become more popular and it is going to be interesting to see if there will be a winner or if it is going to be the case where USB3 follows on from the fact that it is already well known and trusted on computer desks or if Thunderbolt will only be a high-end niche component that will only suit the computer professionals.

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