iMac Gets Thunderbolt I/O, Quad-core

fergus07 writes "Apple's desktop lineup has typically pushed users requiring plenty of fast I/O towards the Mac Pro — but the latest iMac refresh has broken the tradition. Quad-core Sandy Bridge CPUs and faster ATI Radeon HD GPUs are welcomed, but it's the addition of Thunderbolt ports (one in the 21.5-inch and two in the 27-inch) that really ups the ante for a number of professional users."

Re:Thunderbolt?

[pushing-robot]

Intel decided to move optical interconnects to the cables themselves. Short Thunderbolt cables will be entirely copper; long cables will have an optical transceiver built into each end.

Re:I thought I clicked "disable advertising"

[Kjella]

I know not reading TFA is par for the course on slashdot, but if you managed to read the summary - all two lines of it - you might have discovered the following hint that these are not laptops: (one in the 21.5-inch and two in the 27-inch)

Re:Hopefully this accelerates its adoption

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

USB uptake on PCs was a function of Intel bundling USB for free on all of it's motherboards. The fact that Apple Corp left it's legacy users in the lurch really had nothing to do with it.

Which is why for several years there all USB devices shipped only in bondi blue to match the look of the iMac? Sorry, but Apple basically created the mainstream USB peripheral market before the PC market caught up and started using them as well.

Re:What happened to 24"?

[TheRaven64]

Tell her to click on the 'refurbished' link on the Apple store. She'll probably find the 24" model for 25% less than it was a week ago.

Re:Hopefully this accelerates its adoption

[Yaztromo]

Revisionist history? I thought Apple was very, very anti-USB and pro-firewire? Heck the first iPod didn't even interface to USB (and therefore couldn't talk to anything but macs). That's how anti-USB apple was initially.

No, not revisionist history at all. Apple was never anti-USB for the types of low speed devices USB 1 was originally designed to handle. Firewire was for significantly higher bandwidth applications of the type USB wasn't originally designed for.

This would be why Apple never released a Firewire mouse or keyboard. You have to recall when USB was originally introduced, it's fastest speed was only 1.5Mbps -- it wasn't until USB 1.1 that "high speed" mode was introduced, running at 12Mbps. Firewire 1 on the other hand, was 400Mbps -- or about 33 times faster. Where USB 1 was painful for external storage, Firewire flew.

This was the situation Apple faced when the iPod 1 was released (which, I should point out, was a Mac-only device at the time, as iTunes hadn't been ported to Windows yet, and the formatted file system out of the box was HFS). They had a choice between slow USB 1 (USB 2 was standardized at the end of 2001. The iPod 1 was released in October 2001, so at the time the iPod 1 was released, virtually all USB ports on consumer machines ran at a maximum of 12Mbps), or fast Firewire 1.

So it was purely about speed -- a device that could store up to 10GB of data (iPod 2's, released in July 2002, could store up to 20GB) needed something faster than 12Mbps. By the time USB 2 become more ubiquitous, Apple released the iPod 3 (April 2003) with USB sync support.

None of which indicates anything about being anti-USB; USB simply wasn't up to the task when the first two generations of iPod were released, whereas Firewire was.

Yaz.