Arstechnica is reporting that Acer one of the leaders in Thunderbolt is dropping it for at least the next year. The entire new MacPro is dependent on Thunderbolt to act as it’s expansion, since it has no user addable PCI slots. So you must use expensive Thunderbolt expansion to add accessories to your new Cylinder MacPro. The thing is that so far Thunderbolt support is pretty underwelming. There are some good raid enclosures, but almost nothing for just hard drive housings for your old drives, and everything else is very expensive. In fact there are very few PC motherboards with Thunderbolt, and none with support for Dual Xeons, so it is very very niche!
Everyone is betting on USB 3, which is almost as fast (and plans on getting even faster, and has backwards compatibility), which every PC has, and yes the MacPro has a few ports, but not enough.
And Thunderbolt is not really a PCI replacement. It is fast, but not nearly as fast as PCI, so you can’t say put an external NVIDIA video card for CUDA support. It would just be too slow.
And without PC support it will always be a very Niche product.
Makes me think if I want to stay with Mac I will have to do a Hackintosh, which are notoriously unstable, but could at least run windows easily, and have everything I want internally instead of in a spiderweb of external expensive thunderbolt peripherals!
I don’t want to have to move fully to windows, but even now I am running bootcamp. And Windows 8 boots faster on my Mac than Mac OS X, and I can build a PC with almost all the expansion I want within a single case with a single power cord. I mean I already have such a serious snake of power cable is am surprised it doesn’t trip the fuse more often!