Friday, November 5, 2010

Lightpeak?

Apple recently said that they wouldn't implement USB 3 for the time being, and right after I see lots of comments talking about light peak and how it's going to be the de-facto standard. For me, I don't really see that as a likely scenario. Even with the implementation of USB 3, the process has been very slow. In fact, it was very slow for USB 2 as well, and took a while before it gained traction in the market place to the point where it is ubiquitous today. One example I give is the displayport/minidisplayport. Apple took an open standard and made their own version. How many monitors out there actually have a minidisplayport? Dell probably has a couple of displayport monitors, but the number is relatively low compared to VGA/DVI adapters. Say light peak comes early next year and apple implements it right away. Will other devices have it? What will happen to firewire? USB 2 will ultimately be necessary. How does it fit in? Will anything in the market even have a light peak adapater? It is highly experimental technology, and how about cost? USB enclosures are fairly cheap compared to firewire. With a light peak enclosure will they be far more expensive compared to firewire enclosures? An advantage of USB 3 is also backwards compatibility with USB 2. This can not be said for light peak.

I am not saying that light peak will not gain traction, I just don't see how it fits in the apple model. Will we have a firewire, USB, lightpeak ports? It also takes a while to develop further functionality, for example target disk mode and firewire. But in the meantime I will wait and see.

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