Thunderbolt cable

MiniDisplay-to-MiniDisplay already exists.

You can plug a mini-Displayport cable into a Thunderbolt port, but that won't make it a Thunderbolt cable. If you don't believe me, spare yourself the trouble of cobbling a cable up yourself and just buy one to try out:

http://www.monoprice.com/products/subdepartment.asp?c_id=102&cp_id=10246&cs_id=1 024602

Of course I believe you. I am here to learn and exachange opinion, nothing else.

English is not my mother language and may be I do not get the real meaning.

Let me put it in this way:

A plug is a device with a number of pins.

If the same plug is both MDP and TB I imagine its pins can send and receive both data.

A cable is a simple electrical conductor with a number of single connectors each of them connects to some or all pins in the plug.

Which is the difference between a MDB and a TB cable ?

Does anybody have informations about ?

Of course I will not try any stupid self made connector.

If you're right about how simple this all is, then of course there can't be any difference between a MDP-MDP cable and a TB-TB cable. So get a MDP-MDP cable and be happy.

Let us know, though, if it turns out that things weren't really quite that simple after all.

My personal suspicion is that if there were no difference, an awful lot of MDP-MDP cables that are now in manufacturers' and vendors' inventories would be getting relabeled as TB-TB cables and having their prices marked way up, right this minute, as I write.

eww, you are correct. We tried to mount a TDM booted MBP with TB to another MBP with TB using a MDP to MDP cable (Belkin, I believe). No joy. We are eagerly awaiting the appearance of a TB-TB cable on the market.

I hear the Thunderbolt cables will be out "this summer", which technically just began today and end in September

To those asking about using TDM with Thunderbolt, or trying to use MDP cables in lieu of real Thunderbolt cables, I would offer the following information.

Thunderbolt was launched with electrical signals running at 10 Gbps using bi-directional data. Since full Thunderbolt technical details have not been revealed publicly, it is not clear if this means one physical data channel running bi-directional data, or two unidirectional data channels, one in each direction, both running 10 Gbps

DisplayPort V 1.1 uses four Data Channels each at 2.7 Gbps, but only unidirectional.

(There is also an Aux Channel which is truly bi-directional, but at a much slower rate.)

Even though DisplayPort and Thunderbolt ports share a common connector design, this does not mean the electrical signals all line up at the max speed available (eg, Thunderbolt). You still have to do change the MDP end to get it to operated in bidirectional mode at the higher data rates of Thunderbolt. This will likely take something more that a simple all-copper MDP-to-MDP cable

In some ways, this would be like having a USB 2.0 port connect to a USB 1.1 device and expecting transfers to operate at the full USB 480 MHz data rates. USB 2.0 devices can talk bidirectionally to slower USB 1.1 devices at their native slower rate as part of their "backward compatibility" mode support, but this is also enabled by by both sides using the same electrical pins operating in a bidirectional mode. DP and Thunderbolt do not share this same level of commonality

TDM mode with Thunderbolt is likely best supported by two Thunderbolt computers with the native Thunderbolt cable once it comes out. Some creative OEM could build a MDP-to-Thunderbolt bridging adaptor, but this would likely only transfer data in one direction (from the MDP-only computer to the Thunderbolt computer)

There is a lot of information at Wikipedia on Thunderbolt if you care to explore further

Thunderbolt cable is different from MDP cable. It requires a couple of in-connector 10Gbit/s transceivers at both ends. Info site: http://www.gennum.com/products/thunderbolt-cable-transceivers/gn2033

The transceivers have also a firmware... See AnandTech's article about Computex2011 at: http://www.anandtech.com/show/4400/computex-2011-some-time-with-promises-thunder bolt-devices

In system profiler's shoot you can see "Cable Micro Firmware Version: Near 0.1.7"...

There is a cable available.

http://store.apple.com/us/product/MC913ZM/A

Yikes. Pretty pricey.

You can always wait for the Monoprice version, although given all the chips needed to make it go fast, the Monoprice version might not be under $10 like all the other cables I buy there.

I don't have any need for one yet.

It'd look pretty silly just dangling there out of the port on my MacBook Pro.

Unless you want to connect it to your new iMac at warp speed 🙂

My desktop Mac is a 2002 eMac in Mac OS 9.2.2.

I have gone to notebooks in a big way ever since I bought my first iBook on eBay in 2002.

Yes, I do a fair amount of photo editing with large files and some video editing in Premier and Final Cut so I need the computing power but I also crave the portability of the MBA. So what I'm considering is to get a small MBA for travel, and just use it in Target Mode with my existing MBP - or possibly with a new iMac when the MPB wears out.