Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by benzoate 2505 days ago
To my knowledge those described have some distinct advantage over what was available on the market at the time. Firewire was way faster, ADC carries USB, Thunderbolt is connected to PCIe, mini-vga and mini-dvi are self explanatory and their proprietary SATA like connection was, again, way faster.
1 comments

Their proprietary SATA was just SATA with a wrong connector. It was not faster. Firewire was faster at the expense of massive security holes. A practical reason for having Thunderbolt connected to PCIe never materialized. Don't kid yourself - Apple made these calls for one reason and one reason only.
There are external GPUs now that use thunderbolt, prior to this you could run external displays at a greater resolution than was available via HDMI at the time.

Firewire was mostly not used because people were content to endure USB, and USB had a larger availability on consumer hardware. Apple gained nothing by spending money to add the port to their computers so I find it hard to buy that they had a secret malevolent purpose in doing so. In this case they rolled the dice on a superior solution and it didn’t pay off.