Apple To Unveil Light Peak, New MacBook Pros This Week? 311
An anonymous reader writes "Apple will reportedly soon make an announcement regarding a new high-speed connection technology. And as luck would have it, this comes hot on the heels of a report that Apple will release a slew of new MacBook Pros later this week. For some time now, reports have abounded detailing Apple and Intel's cooperation on a new transfer technology dubbed Light Peak capable of transferring data at 10GB/s both up and down. Could this find its way into Apple's new lineup of MacBook Pros as has been previously rumored?"
Re:Where does Light Peak fit? (Score:2, Informative)
No they won't get royalties. It's Intel's baby, not theirs.
Re:What's the use (Score:5, Informative)
Light Peak isn't really a port standard like USB or Firewire, it's a consolidator. You can run USB over Light Peak, same with Firewire, HDMI, Audio, Networking, etc. The goal with Light Peak is to connect two cords to your laptop (power and Light Peak) and have everything connected to the other end of Light Peak (Monitor, USB keyboard/mouse, Firewire drive, Ethernet, etc), making it much less cluttered around your laptop and enabling you to pick it up and go fairly quickly. This really shows off in smaller devices, take a Netbook or a Tablet, instead of needing all that space and hardware for USB, and the like you can simply route it over Light Peak and have one connector take care of it all.
Since this is an Intel standard (albeit sponsored and pushed by Apple) it doesn't come with the restrictions that Apple would have placed on it if it were their own standard. This should be fairly open and available. I bet within a year, two at most, nearly all laptops will have this port, and there will be expansion cards available for PC's to add the port. That is, unless it's a total flop, which is possible.
Mind your B's (Score:2, Informative)
10G[B]/s or 10G[b]/s? Wikipedia says 10Gb/s.
Re:Where does Light Peak fit? (Score:0, Informative)
I didn't hear anything about DLNA until Apple started pushing airplay.
wat. Win7 supported DLNA out of the box. So do various Motorola and Samsung Android phones.
Re:Apple have officially lost me... (Score:2, Informative)
How is intel delaying 3.0 when it's already out on pretty much every new motherboard out there? Get your facts straight you friggin drama queen
Re:What's the use (Score:2, Informative)
Cable length
Re:Yet another Apple "standard" (Score:4, Informative)
USB wasn't a standard option at the time of windows 98. Indeed it wasn't until winXP that you could use a USB keyboard easily, as the built in BIOS wouldn't use USB keyboards for setup.
Apple doesn't pioneer a lot of things. apple is usually the first to bring them to the mass market intelligently.
Also USB support in windows 98 sucked. you needed to install drivers for everything but mice and keyboards.
Re:I'm thinking... (Score:5, Informative)
You mean like the mini-Displayport - a port they standardised and has been rolled into the displayport standard, that is also royalty free?
All of the ports on the back of a Mac are standard - USB, Firewire, Mini-displayport, ethernet, 3.5mm hybrid toslink/analog audio, SD card reader (some machines)...
Sorry, what "trendy white gold latched cable that I can only use with one computer" are you talking about? None of my cables that are hooked up to my Mac are from Apple, except the power cord and that's a standard IEC "kettle lead" too.
Re:What's the use (Score:2, Informative)
That's what she said...
Re:What's the use (Score:4, Informative)
No, no, no. You connect your lightPeak to a hub, or to your monitor, and then run your USB/FW/DP cables from that hub to everything else. For a desktop, it's almost useless, as the octopus now originates from your monitor, or perhaps a hub near your monitor. You still need the regular ports on your PC so that you can have a small octopus from your external HD, camera, network, etc coming from the computer for things that run right off the main box.
The real (only?) advantage I see is that this could become a docking port connector to replace the (limited) port replicators and unique-by-laptop-series docking station connections.
Re:What's the use (Score:3, Informative)
Nope they where not standard... they where usua, but connectors etc could be different from device to device even though they implemented the same protocols etc.
USB is closer to a standard, and Firewire is an standard, governed by IEEE. OpenCL is a Standard that Apple initiated but is governed now by Khronos Group.
In that sense Googles WebM is not a standard but MPEG 4 is which has h.264 and is governed by ISO/IEC. h.264 even has an ISO number.
So while some tote Apples webkit as an Standard it's not a standard, but its an open platform.
And to the one trolling about usb in PC back in 1996. Yeah there was some PCs who had USB ports but far from all. Even less there where no peripherals using USB then. The Apple iMac propelled USB market. And nearly every USB peripheral that came out then had matching color for each iMac color.
~99.5% of all USB peripherals back then where designed for the Macs. Especially the iMacs.
I remember the times when the using iomega Zip disk on a PC, slow as HD diskette. On the mac almost as fast as the internal hard drive, plug n play even.
Re:What's the use (Score:3, Informative)
DisplayPort [wikipedia.org]
Bandwidth - 1.62, 2.7, or 5.4 Gbit/s data rate per lane; 1, 2, or 4 lanes; (effective total 5.184, 8.64, or 17.28 Gbit/s for 4-lane link); 1 Mbit/s or 720 Mbit/s for the auxiliary channel.
Light Peak [wikipedia.org]
Bandwidth - 10 Gbit/s (demonstrated), 100 Gbit/s (claimed by 2020)