Where are the thunderbolt HDD enclosures and other peripherals ?

mcharle wrote:

Oops, you have got me wrong. My gripe is not with Apple. It's with EVERYBODY ELSE!

Then complain EVERYWHERE ELSE

What you want does not exist yet, how much simpler can it get.

Csound1, as has been noted in another post regarding your somewhat patronizing previous post ("What you want does not exist yet, how much simpler can it get." sic) "WE KNOW THAT, THAT IS WHY THIS THREAD EXISTS!"

Now, if anyone knows WHY what we want does not exist, then such an explanation would actually add something to the conversation and not just take up space and time telling us things that we obviously already know. How much simpler can it get than that?

Why not ask these questions of the manufacturers of enclosures, nobody here has access to their future plans, and Apple do not make external bare enclosures.

Csound1 makes a valid point: "Why not ask these questions of the manufacturers of enclosures, nobody here has access to their future plans, and Apple do not make external bare enclosures."

Valid though this might be, it seems to me that, as the initiator of the existence of Thunderbolt ports in personal computers, it is at least possible that someone in the extended Apple family might know why there has been such a long delay between putting the ports on Macintosh computers and third-party manufactures starting to build Thunderbolt enclosures. Thus, it is logical to ask the question in this thread, because it is at least possible that at least one person who reads it here, be they Apple employee or not, might know the answer and post it.

However, "knowing why" there has been such a delay and "being willing to say why" are not necessarily the same thing. Let me just take a wild guess here. I posit that there are many, many Apple employees who know exactly what the answer to this question is, but who have been deterred from publicly stating the answer (or, in the current doublespeak of of 21st Century America, they have been "disincetivized," to contort our already contorted version of English one more step).

To say that it is be someone else's product, and that, therefore, we must ask this question on this unnamed entity's website is a cop out. After all, if the products have not yet been built, they are no less Apple's products than anyone else's. And in any case, it is not credible to say that, because Apple does not build it, neither Apple, nor anyone who reads this thread, would know anything about this issue, thus preventing them from even making an educated guess as to the answer.

Let me take one more wild guess here, since no one is willing to say anything more definitive. My wild guess it that, because, at least at the beginning, the number of Thunderbolt devices manufactured will be relatively small, and because the licensing fees that must be paid to Apple and others are relatively large in comparison to the numbers of Thunderbolt products produced, the economies of scale dictate that the strategy of Apple and their third party partners must be to sell only very expensive Thunderbolt products initially, before providing their customers with reasonably priced enclosures that can be populated with competitively priced hard drives or SSDs.

This is a pity. The poor home user takes it in the shorts again. They are sold computers that have been hyped as having a great new technology (Thunderbolt), only to find out after they buy it that, unless they are willing to pay a price that rivals the cost of their computer, they probably will not be able to actually make use of this new technology (Thunderbolt), until after the computer has long since been parked in the attic, gathering dust.

I hope that everything that I have said here is untrue, and that tomorrow I will see an Apple Thunderbolt product (or product of one of Apples' third-part partners) for sale that I can afford to buy. After all, I can't help but think that Steve would never have allowed such a strategy, even if the economies of scale deem such a strategy more economically more feasible than thinking of Apple's customers first.

FWIW, I did ask SonnetTech a few months ago, and they said it was due to a moratorium on certain applications of this technology by Intel. That Intel wanted to limit the usage initially for some reason, which was never stated.

Casemon wrote:

FWIW, I did ask SonnetTech a few months ago, and they said it was due to a moratorium on certain applications of this technology by Intel. That Intel wanted to limit the usage initially for some reason, which was never stated.

I'm not questioning your statement but that seems like a dumb way to promote new tech

This sounds like my reasoning almost exactly. In fact, I was told in the Apple Store that my preferences for towers (9500, G4, G5) was illogical, and that I should switch to iMacs because of Thunderbolt. I bought it hook, line, and sinker. I guess that I need to cough up the dough for a Mac Pro after all. Am I right about this, or wrong (I hope everyone thinks that I am wrong, that we are on the verge of affordable Thunderbolt SSD RAIDs, and that I can keep my iMac i7).

One thing that should be stated for the record is caveat emptor.

A salesperson at a Mac store told you to buy an iMac for the Thunderbolt capabilities.

A quick google search on "Thunderbolt" should have flagged an alarm, but clearly didn't.

In the world of technology, a person must do their own research, and simply cannot rely solely on what

a $10/hour + commisions salesperson tells you.

Making assumptions is suicide.

I bought a 2007 MacBook Pro, and assummed that I would be able to use the ExpressCard, the FW800, FW400, external monitor, and both USB ports simultaneously.

I found out only recently that using up all the ports on my laptop simultaneously is not possible!

All the troubleshooting I did, cable swapping, hair pulling, I can whine about "Why didn't anybody tell me this when I bought it?!" but I've since learned an important lesson about all of this: caveat emptor.

Whilst looking into this very issue (after getting my first Mac yesterday), I have come across an article on MacWorld where they had a bit of an insight due to an interview with people at LaCie.

The gist of it: that the reason for the delay is that Thunderbolt is quite complex and the engineers have been making sure that they understand everything properly and that stuff works as it should. As such the testing has taken longer to complete etc. The bigger names want to give users a smooth experience and because it isn't as simple to throw together as a USB cable, we'd had to wait for these devices.

Original article can be found here: http://www.macworld.com/article/162509/2011/09/speedy_thunderbolt_devices_slowly _coming_to_market.html

As long as we get bare HDD enclosures next year I'll be happy 🙂

Add another "coming soon" Thunderbolt enclosure manufacturer to the list:

http://www.eteknix.com/news/orico-presents-a-new-series-of-thunderbolt-hard-driv e-enclosures/

Only renders for now and no specifics yet on time & price but hopefully they'll hit before Sonnet does in "early 2012".

If I buy a new DAW iMac I think I'll have OWC put an eSATA port on it. Go with that for the time being.

@Philip

Was thinking similar, until I read that Thunderbolt xfer speed is faster than eSata & usb3 COMBINED

Think I can wait another month or so to future proof my array for the years to come 🙂

(now if JBOD array thunderbolt enclosures are delayed, then maybe I'll jump on the eSata for now)

That's true but you'll need currently pricey SSD drives to get that kind of performance. Hopefully you'll be able to swap out SATA drives for SSDs down the road. It's kind of a crap shoot.😕