What you need to know about Thunderbolt

24.02.2011

Perhaps, although could be a very long time. Thunderbolt is brand new, and as such it will be a while before it becomes anywhere near as commonplace as USB and FireWire. It's expected to be widely adopted by vendors and peripheral makers over the next few years, but until most popular peripherals are available with Thunderbolt connections, we don't expect these legacy connections to disappear entirely from the Mac lines.

That said, we all remember the original iMac, when Apple nixed legacy serial and ADB connectors in favor of USB--long before USB peripherals were commonplace and inexpensive--and we can imagine the idea of a single port and connector appealing to Apple and Steve Jobs. Just look at the dock-connector port that adorns the iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch. Speaking of which...

As noted above, Thunderbolt relies on PCI Express, the architecture that underpins Macs and most PCs. But iOS devices don't use a PCI Express architecture, which would presumably make it difficult to simply stick a Thunderbolt port on an iPhone. Plus the dock-connector port on iOS devices provides quite a bit of additional functionality--it's got 30 connection pins for a reason, after all. Finally, it's not clear what benefits Thunderbolt would provide that the dock-connector port is missing. We suspect it's far more likely that Apple will eventually sell an optional Thunderbolt-to-dock-connector cable for charging and syncing.