Thunderbolt

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.

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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."

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Apple could further slim its MacBook Air and Pro range by combining ports, a new patent application suggests, developing hybrid USB and SD card reader ports that save notebook space without sacrificing connectivity. The newly published patent, simply titled "combined input port", describes a single connector that, thanks to offset pins inside, could work with both a regular USB plug or the contacts on a memory card, depending on which the user required at the time. However, the same arrangement could also be used for combining any other mixture of ports, such as Thunderbolt, Apple points out.

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Apple will release a new version of Final Cut Pro X tailored to the 4K capabilities of the new Mac Pro 2013, the company has confirmed, refueling rumors of an updated, far higher resolution Thunderbolt Display to match the workstation's graphics capabilities. The new Mac Pro, previewed during Apple's WWDC keynote on Monday, will arrive later this year, complete with support for driving three Ultra HD monitors simultaneously.

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Back in April, Intel teased an update to Thunderbolt at the National Association of Broadcasters show, and today has revealed that officially as the Thunderbolt 2. Thunderbolt 2 builds upon the current Thunderbolt technology to offer 4K video transfer and display simultaneously. Current plans have production starting the end of this year, and kicking into full gear in 2014.

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After over a year of waiting, Belkin has finally released its Thunderbolt Express Dock. It was originally announced last year in January and was slated for a September 2012 release, but that obviously never happened. However, Belkin just launched the $299 dock yesterday, and we’ve taken the time to give it a good look-over and test it out for ourselves. Personally, as a MacBook Pro user who is constantly docking and undocking my laptop at my desk, I wanted to see if Belkin’s Thunderbolt Express Dock would make the whole process easier. Let’s find out how it fared.

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It's taken a while - a very long while - but Belkin's Thunderbolt Express Dock has finally hit shelves, offering Mac users a simple way to hook up a workstation's-worth of peripherals by stringing a single cable. First announced back in January 2012, and clearly missing its original release date in September of the same year, the $299.99 Thunderbolt Express Dock offers three USB 3.0 ports, gigabit ethernet, and a pass-through Thunderbolt connector of its own, among other things.

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