| The MacBook Pro now features a 10Gbps Thunderbolt peripheral interface. |
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| Friday, 25 February 2011 | |
On Thursday 24th February 2011 Apple released a refresh of the MacBook Pro laptop range. Though the case design did not change and they look much the same as the last years model, there are some very important technical changes. The most significant news is the introduction of a new high speed interface named Thunderbolt. And thunder this will - up to 10Gbps. A welcome change for all who need the extra speed and bandwidth to make use of high speed external devices such as RAID drives and very large display arrays. Interesting times ahead. We expect a whole lot of exiting new peripherals. You might not find the new Thunderbolt port because it has been cleverly integrated with the existing DisplayPort. This combines the functions of the existing display technology with Thunderbolts Intel engineered PCI Express protocol offering about 12 times the speed of Firewire 800 allowing the transfer of a full length HD movie in less than 30 seconds. Wow.  It is interesting to note that Apple has chosen not to upgrade the USB2 port to the latest USB3. Being somewhat flawed perhaps Apple's engineers think that the USB protocol is on its way out. Thunderbolt is reported to have much lower latency which translates into much higher achievable speeds over copper wires. Optical fiber will probably be the future of all high speed peripherals. But engineering a much cheaper copper cable system may turn out to be another masterful Apple design to get peripheral makers to bring lots of affordable high speed storage to the market place. We may even see a whole lot of new monitors with Thunderbolt technology allowing the daisy-chaining of Thunderbolt drives via the monitors through port without the need of a hub. Hopefully Intel and Apple will be shrewd enough not to lock out competitors from using this new technology. After all the core technology Thunderbolt is based on, PCI Express, is already commonplace on PC motherboards and laptops. We hope for a faster industry wide acceptance of Thunderbolt than Firewire. Other important changes are the upgrade of the 13in MacBook Pro processor from the Intel Core 2 Duo to the Core i5 or i7 2 core processors running at up to 2.7Ghz whilst the 15 & 17in models now all come with Quad Core i7 processors. Another important change is the inclusion of the latest AMD Radeon Graphics Processors with up 1Gb GDDR5 graphics memory. Must not forget to mention the upgrade of the SD card slot to SDXC allowing the use of SD card up to 2TB. This is an important upgrade for photography and video applications. Interestingly, the benchmark performance of the new MacBook Pro lineup is now faster than than the current Mac Pro desktop. Nice one. Can’t wait to get my hands on one of these. Happy Birthday to Steve Jobs. Best wishes and get well soon.  |
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