Thunderbolt

This is off-topic, but I'm excited about the new I/O technology that made its debut in the brand new MacBook Pro recently. It's called Thunderbolt (or LightPeak if you're Intel, it's co-creator), and it's really, really fast.

Imagine connecting a video camera, hard disk drive or additional display (or all of them, with a single type of cable) to your shiny new laptop, knowing that the device's throughput is well over 21 times the speed of conventional USB 2.0. Thunderbolt is much faster than USB 3.0, FireWire, and Gigabit Ethernet that most workstations use for network connectivity! Put bluntly, Thunderbolt's throughput is thousands of times greater than the residential Internet connection you're currently using to view this web page.

Maybe you don't care about this stuff at all. Maybe you don't get exited about the emergence of a groundbreaking technology that lies within a computer system, but I'd bet you're into what it could do for you. How about pulling those photos from your camera into iPhoto in record time? Or, what about playing a high definition movie, while copying a multi-Gigabyte file from an external drive to your Mac (or PC)?



This level of performance was once reserved for laboratories and high performance grid computing, with custom network interconnects. Thunderbolt is certainly a breakthrough for consumer-class mobile devices. Now you can have a truly high-performance video editing, sound engineering, or graphic design system that travels with you.

Yeah, it's a big deal.

Good Night