LaCie has been making storage products for years and has some of the best looking external storage devices you will find. The company announced what it claims to be the fastest portable storage solution in the world last month. While LaCie offered up all the details on the Little Big Disk with Thunderbolt 2 in January, we didn't know a few things.
LaCie has introduced the Little Big Disk Thunderbolt 2 here at CES 2014, something the company is hailing as the faster portable storage option presently available. As you may have guessed from the name, the LBD model uses Thunderbolt 2, which allows it to transfer speeds of up to 1375MB/s, outpacing USB 3.0 by quite a bit. As with some of the other design-centric products LaCie introduced today, the Little Big Disk also has a carefully-chosen design.
Earlier this year, LG introduced some new UltraWide monitors, a category the company will be expanding soon with the debut of the UM95 at CES 2014. The UltraWide UM95 monitor measures in at 34-inches with a quite expansive 21:9 aspect ratio, though the company will also be offering a smaller version that measures 29-inches. Beyond the UM95, LG plans to showcase some other UltraWide offerings next month.
Note: This is LG's similar EA73 UltraWide we reviewed in October.
The release of the 33-foot-long Thunderbolt Optical Cable by Corning is a long-awaited event. For those that want to move data along a wired connection - a long distance, at that - there's a lot to be said about the 10 Gbit/s bi-directional, dual channel technology, and as the first "all-optical" offering in the world - at this length, at least - Corning is bringing a rather unique product to the market.
It's all-change in Mac land, and after the MacBook Air got its Haswell refresh earlier this year - to great effect - it's the turn of the MacBook Pro with Retina display to be brought up to speed. Apple's pixel-dense desktop replacement was always a powerhorse, at least in 15-inch form, but now gets Intel fourth-gen Core processors and Iris Pro graphics to deliver more grunt along with more battery life.
Akitio is a company that makes a number of different external storage solutions designed to work with different connectivity options on desktop and laptop computers. The company has unveiled its latest external desktop storage solution with 512 GB of storage. The product is called the Akitio Neutrino Thunderbolt Edition and it claims to be the world's first fully bus-powered 512 GB SSD Thunderbolt storage solution.
At the Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco this week, Corning has announced that it has been granted an Intel certification for Thunderbolt Optical Cables by Corning, the first all-optical fiber Thunderbolt cables. According to the company, the optical fiber cables support both Thunderbolt and Thunderbolt 2 protocols and will be available "in the coming weeks."
While it's been reported that we won't be seeing the new Thunderbolt standard until next year, ASUS has already announced what we believe is the very first product to sport the faster 20Gbps Thunderbolt 2 standard. It's called the Z87-Deluxe/Quad motherboard, and it takes two 10Gbps Thunderbolt ports and mashes it into one bi-directional 20Gbps port.
The Universal Serial Bus is getting a sweet upgrade. The USB alliance has made official the name of the 10Gbps specification for USB, and they're calling it USB 3.1. While only USB 3.1 products will get the faster speeds, the new specification will be backwards compatible with USB 3.0 and USB 2.0.
It's a frankenstein monster of efforts, this computing rig appearing this afternoon, one that connects a MacBook Air to graphics it has no business running on its own - but certainly has the ability to roll with, it would seem. This amalgamation of bits and pieces starts with a Thunderbolt to Express Card adapter, moving on then to an ExpressCard to PCI-Express adapter, then connecting in the end to an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 570 graphics card. This beast then - after all that - brings what very much appears to be a high-end gaming experience to the Apple notebook.
Acer has ditched plans to push Thunderbolt on its Windows PCs, turning instead to USB 3.0 despite being the first PC manufacturer to support Intel's high-speed connection. According to Acer, which first included Thunderbolt on the Aspire S5 ultrabook in early 2012, it's a matter of cost, USB 3.0 offering comparable speed among other advantages, and the continuing shortage of peripherals actually using Thunderbolt technology that have soured it on the port.
The Apple Thunderbolt Display is long overdue a makeover. Revealed in July 2011, the 27-inch monitor has watched generations of MacBook come and go - and, until this year at least, the Mac Pro stagnate with no compatibility whatsoever - and, despite the iMac aesthetic it originally echoed being significantly upgraded last October, still languishes with its original design. Sometimes, with Apple, you have to be patient. The company has, for the most part, a yearly refresh cycle, but the Thunderbolt Display is (in tech terms) old. Still, that arguably just gives Apple the chance to do something particularly special with the new Thunderbolt Display - so here's my wish list.