[wazoox]

I had one of these for some months and I'd say the only culprit is that there are only 1 mini DP and 2 USB ports and nothing else: no SD card slot, no Thunderbold or Firewire. Even a third USB port would have been nice. There isn't any kensington lock port, either.

The screen is glossy but for some reason, it's not actually catching too many random reflections (so it's much better than my MacBook which can hardly be used when sitting back to the window).

The touchpad feel isn't as good as a MacBook but it's large and much better than those from most other PCs I've tried. Overall a nice machine.

[smackfu]

Hasn't the PC world moved on to USB3, ignoring Thunderbolt? And even Apple has dropped Firewire at this point.

[wazoox]

Thunderbolt is an Intel technology, and it can be found (albeit rarely) on Asus (and maybe other) high-end laptops and motherboards. And even one firewire port would be better than no port :)

[MetaCosm]

Thunderbolt is way too expensive for most hardware (and tightly controlled, which bothers some manufactorers), and USB3 is damn near free. Thunderbolt is expensive for the manufactorer and expensive for the user (read: complex cable requirements). With USB3.1 "doubling" the speed of USB3.0 in a backwards compatible way -- I suspect it will continue to dominate.

[ycui1986]

There is one thing, USB3 cannot solve, the latency(typical latency of USB is around 1 ms, compared to PCI-e sub-us). Graphics cards will never work on USB3 port. Well, external graphics card is for consumer market. For industrial, high speed data acquisition system has sub-us latency over PCI-e bus, which is included in thunderbolt. That is one of real application of thunder bolt. But I have not seen any such device utilizing thunderbolt.

[MetaCosm]

This isn't actually true -- the latency of Thunderbolt is 1.5 microseconds, which means if you are building something (like a video card) with internal latency expectations, they will all fail.

If it had internal style latency, there would be GOBS of devices pushing to jump on it, but it simply doesn't. You can't even respond correctly to interupts... compared to internal PCI -- it is painfully slow.

[rsynnott]

Thunderbolt is seeing some take-up on the high end; it solves a different set of problems to USB3.

[smackfu]

I don't disagree... on a Mac.

On a PC, I'm not sure what else there is to plug in to a Thunderbolt port other than storage.

[supergauntlet]

The thing is, Thunderbolt manages to be this amalgamation of miniDP and PCIe x4. It is actually entirely possible to run PCIe devices on a thunderbolt connection, which means things like external graphics cards are now again viable (since almost no consumer computers have expresscard slots now).

[Touche]

Where is it seeing take-up outside of the Apple ecosystem?

[igravious]

They are USB3 ports though, aren't they?

Dedicated ethernet would be nice. Thunderbolt would be nice. Firewire would be nice. A DVD/blu-ray drive would be nice. Ultrabooks seem not to have these things. Make no mistake, I would not have bought one if it had been USB2.

   -[0000:00]-+-00.0  Intel Corporation 3rd Gen Core processor DRAM Controller
              +-02.0  Intel Corporation 3rd Gen Core processor Graphics Controller
              +-14.0  Intel Corporation 7 Series/C210 Series Chipset Family USB xHCI Host Controller
              +-16.0  Intel Corporation 7 Series/C210 Series Chipset Family MEI Controller #1
              +-1a.0  Intel Corporation 7 Series/C210 Series Chipset Family USB Enhanced Host Controller #2
              +-1b.0  Intel Corporation 7 Series/C210 Series Chipset Family High Definition Audio Controller
              +-1c.0-[01]----00.0  Qualcomm Atheros AR9462 Wireless Network Adapter
              +-1d.0  Intel Corporation 7 Series/C210 Series Chipset Family USB Enhanced Host Controller #1
              +-1f.0  Intel Corporation QS77 Express Chipset LPC Controller
              +-1f.2  Intel Corporation 7 Series Chipset Family 6-port SATA Controller [AHCI mode]
              \-1f.3  Intel Corporation 7 Series/C210 Series Chipset Family SMBus Controller