14 DAY TRIAL // In accordance with earlier reports saying Apple was planning to introduce an accessory that supports Thunderbolt, the tech giant located in Cupertino, California has officially launched a 2-meter cable that features a Thunderbolt port on each end, selling it for $49.00.
Needless to point out, the price is steep, considering that it is imperative to have this cable it in order to actually use Thunderbolt, which Apple heavily touts to advertise the new MacBook Pro family, as well as new-generation iMacs.
A standard developed by Intel and commercially introduced by Apple earlier this year, Thunderbolt uses the same connector as Mini DisplayPort and offers twice the peak speed of USB 3.0 (which supports transfer speeds of up to 5 Gbit/s), and two independent buses.
Apple itself notes on the marketing page of its newly launched accessory product that “Thunderbolt technology supports blazing-fast data transfer with two independent channels of 10Gbit/s each.”
“Use the Apple Thunderbolt cable to connect your Thunderbolt-equipped peripherals to your new iMac or new MacBook Pro,” reads the advertisment.
“Apple Thunderbolt cable can also be used for Target Disk Mode between two Macs that support Thunderbolt, or to use a new iMac as a display for a MacBook Pro equipped with Thunderbolt,” the company adds.
Though initially registered with Apple, full rights of the Thunderbolt trademark reportedly belong to Intel.
For the time being, there are few devices that can make good use of the standard and, implicitly the expensive new cable sold by Apple.
One of these devices is the Promise Pegasus R4 4TB RAID System. It is actually the first four-bay high-performance hardware RAID solution designed to unleash the raw power of Thunderbolt, according to its makers.
Pegasus is compatible with Mac systems with Thunderbolt and you can also get one that comes with 8 terabytes of storage.
Although it costs one thousand dollars (in its base 4TB form), the RAID system does not come with its own Thunderbolt cable.
Apple has also released a Thunderbolt Firmware Update for Snow Leopard users. Learn more here.