The new MacBook Pros came in today, and they look pretty sweet. The thing I am most excited about is the new Thunderbolt interface. It’s a new input/output interface with incredible speed, and it’s very flexible. Right now, most computers have USB, Ethernet, video, and possibly firewire ports on them, Thunderbolt could possibly replace all of them. You can also daisy chain Thunderbolt devices. So you could bring your laptop home, connect a single Thunderbolt cable to it and immediately get your networking connection, external storage, large screen display, video camera, and a whole host of regular peripherals connected at wickedly fast speeds.
How fast? It uses the PCI express standard which is the same standard that is used in the internal connections of the computer. This means that if you hooked a hard drive to your computer with Thunderbolt, you would get about 20 times the speed of a USB 2 connection. That’s pretty amazing, but there are even more possibilities. Since we are dealing with the same speeds as are found on the inside of the computer, what would stop us from connecting larger RAM or graphics processors? What if we could connect our laptop computer to our home docking station and get a much more powerful machine as well as being connected to our displays, etc. Or imagine having your desktop machine, external storage, networking, etc. all down in the basement and you have Thunderbolt connection, a monitor, and pointing device in your office. You could have your home wired with the stuff and potentially be able to connect your phone from about any room.
The possibilities are endless. True, the only things compatible with it right now are monitors, but it’s only been out one day! Let’s see where this is in a year, Im expecting some great things!