Report: Apple pushed Intel to develop Light Peak cabling - Page 2

That was no hackintosh. Intel is a huge corporation and they would never publicly do that. The fact that Intel's demo machine was running OS X is just pure proof that Apple and Intel developed this together and that Apple already has it in products in the R&D pipeline. That explains why Intel says there will be products in the market in 2010 using the technology.

Apple will push technology forward yet again and if the PC manufacturers don't jump on quickly and Microsoft doesn't build support into Windows quickly, Macs are going to be way ahead of the game!

I'm really excited to see what happens next year!

Wrong. In most cases, flash memory is faster than hard disks.

Not something like your average storage flash. Just look at how slow USB pen drives are. You're into SSD territory when you're talking about flash that's faster than a mechanical hard drive.

?! It can't even keep up with USB2!

took too long to ban this person. I never understand people that rant for the reason, their hate the company or product in a site that majority of people use to obtain an update on their favorite company/product.

Okay to provide a opinion, which we may not agree with, but with good logic facts/opinions, but to rant, just do not visit this site.

He was on a personal crusader to change us all.. bye bye

P.S. Please stay away from this site, since if you were throw out of a building/conference/club in real life, you would stay away, have some dignity and know, when you are not wanted.

Yeah but even that is false now.

edit: ...and it'll be even more false by the time Light Peak cables become a reality.

This is some nice technology and all, but lets think for a moment- what we are going to actually connect these Light Peak cables to? Think of how many ethernet ports there are out there. Of how many HDMI/DVI/VGA ports there are out there. Of how many USB ports there are out there. Those don't just go away. Apple may be able to do it on Apple designed hardware going forward, but how do you connect to all the current devices out there? Not to be cynical, but do we then have to purchase an assortment of Light Peak-to-____ connectors from Apple to connect existing devices?

It may supplement the dock connector for syncing with a computer, but I can't see this replacing it for any other purpose. They still have that huge ecosystem of iPod/iPhone accessories that can't be converted to optical. Especially since Apple just released the connector APIs to let iPhone developers work with it more easily.

Sure, why not just allow humans and technology alike to become stagnant and non changing, why shame on apple for pushing the evolution of technology forward with new ideas and impelentations, yea bad apple.

If I understand Light Peak correctly, Apple and other PC manufacturers can phrase out all kinds of different ports and only put multiple Light Peak ports in their computers, while consumers can make use of all the ports with their devices rather than only a couple of them. You don't need different kinds of connectors because it's what Light Peak all about.

Guess you confused Mr. K with me?


He's not permanently banned. The ban expires in three days.



It is odd. I guess people do it for the attention.


Exactly, which is why to say this:


is not necessary. If upon his return NonVendorVan can tone it down on the personal insults he's welcome to express well-argued anti-apple sentiments. It's good to have a few people to counter-balance the few rabid Apple fanbois.

I think this port will be gradually folded into the port compliment of Macs (and PCs).

Add a port or two to the laptops, along with the regular compliment of other ports. Over the next year, as peripherals come out with these ports, subsequent revisions of the hardware will see normal USB and Firewire ports replaced by LP. There is a lot of RJ-45 infrastructure out there, so I don't see that physical port going anywhere soon. Same for the audio ports.

The desktops have more space to work with so they could always give a majority of it's port real estate to LP (eventually), and keep legacy USB and Firewire in the back for older peripherals. Video ports would be dictated by the video card manufacturers, they will likely offer DP, DVI, alongside LP if it really takes off in the graphics market.

This is all speculation but if LP lives up to the hype, it can change computing dramatically. I'm thinking of external graphics cards for laptops, single-port port replicators, easier clustering, and more.

LightPeak is not incompatible with all the other standards: you can have a LightPeak connector at one end and any other connector at the other end, be it another LP, or simple USB3, FW, ethernet, HDMI or DP connectors. All you need is an optic fiber, 2 metal wires* and some converter at the connector end.

* one for power and one for grounding. These wires have to be there anyway to protect the optical fiber from over-bending.

Faster for lots of small files. Slower for streaming larger files. This is why you see SSS drives offered for os drives. For large data files like movies hard drives are faster and cheaper

If the price is right then pc makers will include them. I built my first pc around the time FireWire came out. It was better than USB, but too expensive. Finally bought a fw port years later when it came on a new sound card

same here. Only if it's cheap will people buy into it

Only if it is cheap will people buy into it?

Perhaps if you are part of the race to the bottom crowd but I suspect that the high end will wand the speed long before the price get to where Joe Broke ComputerGeek will even look at it.

VGA
Mini VGA
DVI
Mini DVI
Micro DVI
Display Port

I may have missed some.


Then you'll have to wait for rev. B, because everyone knows you never buy a rev. A Apple product.


This is a very valid point. It seems Apple is trying to simplify and reduce the number of ports, not add new ones. Also explains lack of HDMI.

But you specifically mentioned iPhone in your post. So streaming large files is a non-issue since for the most part users send small files to the iPhone. There's no sustained writing there.

If you meant thumb drives in general, then perhaps you have a point but you specifically talked about iPhone usage of Light Peak.

And this is all assuming that flash technology will stagnate and not improve by the time Light Peak is out.

The price is a non-issue also since you're the one that brought up speed and not cost. If you're going to add more variables to the mix then, yes, the HDD is cheaper but will never use up anywhere near 1/10th of Light Peak's slowest standard.

Read his posts (http://forums.appleinsider.com/searc...earchid=302600) and tell me if one of them have logic to them, reason for my post. He did not like Apple and expressed in irrational, without logic way. I did not write my post because of this discussion thread, but his continuous ranting and naming calling.

I hope he changes, but behavior like that especially on the web, never changes, because he is not accountable, since he can hide behind a computer screen!

I enjoy the anti-apple people, since their determination to show the 'other side' of apple with factual data lets us all realize that apple no different from MS, EXCEPT Apple give us better products. But he never give us a logic argument and was insulting, so I stand by my post.

Don't go assuming about everyone here. I myself have a lot of hatred.

I hate it when companies purposefully withhold new technologies for the sake of profit...or control for that matter. I hate it when companies screw up what could be great tech products because of ineptitude. I also hate primitive tech in general.

Hate isn't always evil.

Agreed, but is that why they've brought Intel in on this technology? If Intel develops/adopts Light Peak (and it works as advertised), then it could move along the same path as USB. In that respect it could be far more successful than Firewire.

The problem with any new i/o protocol is how do you connect to all of the legacy equipment you already own? If I buy a new Mac I don't want to buy all new peripherals or a slew of little dongle adapters all over the place.

USB is still going to be useful for some time in my opinion. It is good for all low power, low bandwidth applications.

Ethernet is just too ubiquitous and inexpensive to be made obsolete by Light Peak.

Seems like a good alternative to HDMI though which is not that common on computers yet anyway and maybe Firewire since that protocol is becoming less popular. As we move toward SSD it might also be suitable as a bus for moving data between storage and memory. And as mentioned, the mobile device syncing seems likely, but I can't really agree with the notion that it will replace everything.

Nothing replaces everything, but we've seen many theoretically indispensable technologies vanish over the past 20 years alone, replaced gradually by other more useful technologies. It certainly can happen.

I agree. The elephant in the room in all this is what about the infrastructure. What good is having high speed connection if it is twiddling its thumbs because the infrastructure is still stuck in the stone age? This is really a problem in areas that have been relatively poor in the past.

I checked your reference and it is very interesting. The thing that I like about having a single fiber-based port that can handle all protocols is that it very much simplifies interfacing multiple devices to the computer. Of course it's likely that most laptops won't have enough of these for all the attached devices, so some sort of hub will be required. And all those legacy USB devices won't be going away. There are a couple of options. The hub can have all Light Peak optical ports, and users can run fiber to the USB device where an adapter converts optical to USB. Or the hub can serve as a USB hub married to a Light Peak hub to which existing devices connect with USB cables (the more likely option). For video output, I expect it would be more practical to use an optical cable directly from the computer or hub, and have an adapter to legacy video displays/TVs at the TV end.

Wonder how soon all of this could be cheap enough to reasonably replace firewire/USB/SCSI/all the video cable formats? I suspect that low bandwidth uses such as USB to printers, for example, would be the last to go, with high bandwidth such as HDMI video the first to convert.

I have a Time Capsule and can't figure out why Apple only included a USB port and not a Firewire port. Good practice is to back up regularly off-site. I plug a small portable USB drive in periodically and it takes forever to back up. That is quite inconvenient. If eventually all devices can plug into a single port natively or via inexpensive adapter, that would help all large data transfer tasks.

You mean, like Firewire? Even SCSI didn't require a hub, and that's ancient tech now. Hubs are an artifact of USB. Something that replaces USB should improve on it, not duplicate its deficiencies, yes?

there is a long list of technically superior solutions that lost to cheaper good enough competitors. Beta was better than VHS and lost. a lot of people said LD was better than DVD because it wasn't compressed. FW was better than USB but Apple wanted too much money. there were a lot of technically better solutions than TCP/IP and Ethernet but they are history.

if you transfer large files like movies then the performance sucks. i can transfer files in the several hundred MB to 1GB range faster over wifi between my windows 7 computers than to my 3GS

Mmm, I hope we don't end up so way ahead of everyone that we have to backtrack by buying all sorts of expensive adaptors for our Ligh Peak-only Macs. You know how Apple miniDisplayPorts us every now and then, while the rest of the industry bemusedly watches our antics.

I mean, would you expect all Cable Modem and ADSL Router manufacturers to produce cheap Light Peak-compatible units in, say, three months after Apple launches a LP-only Mac lineup?

I'm all for LP, but I want a smooth transition, and Apple's hardware transitions are usually painful for long time users, contrary to the party line.

Apple initially charged $1.00 per port, but dropped even that negligible fee quickly. You could probably write a book about why some technologies become widely adopted and other don't (as you say, merit often has little to do with it), but I think in the case of Firewire vs. USB, the latter achieved broader adoption because it was developed and pushed by Intel.

As for Beta vs. VHS, that's a complicated story which is frequently over-simplified to make convenient points.

Both hubs and daisychaining are valid ways to interconnect and group devices, logically and/or physically. Actually, a SCSI hub would have been a very nice thing to have back in the days.

I suppose ideally you get both options. Is that possible with optical? I'm wondering whether something less bulky like a splitter would be feasible.

When Apple dropped legacy i/o port support in favor of USB on the iMac, it didn't take very long for a great many peripherals to become available. There was some short term confusion and inconvenience (I remember a brief outcry that the iMac "couldn't use a printer" because it had no serial port).

Of course, that was an industry wide transition that had Intel putting their full weight behind USB, introduced into a market that really needed it. Whether or not Light Peak would follow a similar path or not is hard to say, but it wouldn't be unprecedented.

I could see the tech being initially introduced a couple of ways: First, as a docking solution for notebooks, requiring a single slender cable from a multi-port breakout box. Using a single port for multiple devices is always going to require some kind of a breakout box (or, as Dr. Millmoss suggests, a splitter) anyway, and multiple cables from multiple ports are no more elegant or compact, so such a set-up wouldn't really be a big kludge compared to what people are doing now. Of course, even better would be an array of devices that use the Light Peak standard and either a hub or a daisy chain (can't remember, has anything referenced whether or not this spec daisy chains?), but either way you still have to get discreet cables from the computer to discreet devices, at some point, no matter how capable your interconnect.

Secondly I could really see this as a great phone/palmtop docking solution. Basically the same deal as a laptop dock, but bringing vastly more functionality to your iPhone/Touch. With the rapid improvements in hardware, it surely won't be very long before your "phone" could serve as the the brains of a perfectly capable desktop/mobile system, as long as you had easy access to full sized peripherals-- keyboard, monitor and storage and power.

Basically, it sounds as if Light Peak could enable an über-dock that would make your iPhone/Touch an actual laptop/desktop replacement.

But in Apple's world, the "hub" is the monitor.

I would expect the firs use of this technology will simply be to replace all the ports on a MacBook with the single Light Peak cable which leads to the Apple Cinema Display that has a bunch of ports on the back as usual. Either that, or the single cable that leads from the monitor to the power brick will put the ports on the power brick.

Ergo: buyers of all-Apple gear will have their single cable "dock" solution and anyone who buys anything else will have to connect it to the back of the monitor or onto the brick under the desk.

like other people said:

where is the power gonna come from?

As far as I know optical fibres can't power up a device...so?

where's the power gonna come from intel?

(As for as cable length in the vid, give us all a break...)

Could you supple references to support your statement?

Thank you.

How could anyone forget ADC?

Who said that?

But in case you were wondering, "In addition, Intel said it's working on bundling the optical fiber with copper wire so Light Peak can be used to power devices plugged into the PC…" as previously pointed out by badNameErr in post #14, and supported by his link http://news.cnet.com/8301-30685_3-10360047-264.html

Very nice.. now just optimize light driven tech to make peripherals run on the tiny ammount of light transmitted through the wire

I don't see this as a replacement for Ethernet or low bandwidth USB. I do see it as a replacement for:

• Firewire
• High-speed USB peripherals (HDs, scanners, etc.)
• eSATA & SATA
• Video ports to an extent
• ExpressCards
• PCI express x1 slots