It's not simply a cable

Which might suggest that there is a fundamental flaw in either the technology or its implementation of the technology.

I have to say that I suspect Thunderbolt will make Firewire 800 look positively popular. Sadly, the basic idea Intel started with (an optical interconnect) sounds like a great idea, but being cynical the implementation sounds like a licence to print money by forcing users to buy extraordinarily expensive 'active' cables. One wonders why since the 'active' bit is in the plug why it shouldn't have been on the port instead which would have meant you then only needed cheap passive cables.

I'd have to agree with you that the difference between a "cable" and a "cable with active components" is pretty irrelevant to the average consumer. All they care about is that the gubbins that connects the device to the computer isridulously expensive.

Don't be so patronising. Of course I know that it has active components. So what? It's still (to anyone but a hopeless technonerd) a cable.

Which contains two 10GBps channels.

It's basically PCI express piped out of the back of the computer. Very fast and ideal for external storage. Serial ATA is only up to 6GBps at the moment.

However much you wave your hands about, this is still a cable (it's listed by Apple as a cable) that costs $49 (and pretty near as much in pounds). It may be wonderful, but that's going to put some consumers off.

If it needs active components, why not build them into the computer and/or devices?

The simple point is it is a professional bus for people who care about performance. If everything on a computer was aimed at low end users then servers would be running on wireless and using SATA hard discs without RAID.

I suspect there will be different cables for different tasks, so that is why the circuitry is build into the lead and not the computer. It saves having two different ports.

SCSI used to require some external components years ago, okay they were only resistors but sometimes high performance requires something a little different.

And look what happened to SCSI. It's still used, just about, but only in servers. There might well be a call for this new technology, but not (IMO) in laptops and low end desktops like the Mini.

WIth the core i7 CPU laptops there is plenty of CPU power and limited expansion.

I would argue that the laptops need such a port more than anything as a Mac Pro has expansion slots.

We'll see how it pans out, but USB3 and the last version of Firewire weren't keeping pace with SATA and PCI express. Since this bus is PCI express based it would be possible to put a graphics card in a box and link it up with a cable, that could be handy.

I ran quite a few things with SCSI over the years, a brilliant bus. Way better than anything the PC world invented. They were stuck with master/slave EIDE when SCSI had up to 7 or so devices.

In reply to a post by gilesjuk:

I ran quite a few things with SCSI over the years, a brilliant bus. Way better than anything the PC world invented. They were stuck with master/slave EIDE when SCSI had up to 7 or so devices.

SCSI was popular on PCs too but was more expensive than EIDE and cost won, Apple didn't have that issue.

I love my MBP 15" Core i7 and just waiting for a Thunderbolt to eSATA adaptor

Well PCs have always favoured the cheap rubbish. That's okay for most people but I expect more than that.

It's 2011 and USB (version 3 and previous versions) still sucks CPU cycles as the controllers are cheap and don't have DMA. There's no excuse for it as the Amiga in 1985 had DMA!