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
While Intel gave us the technical rundown on its next iteration of Thunderbolt two months earlier, it’s now announced that it will officially be known as the not-particularly-original Thunderbolt 2. Promising 20 Gbps throughput and support for 4K video, Intel is now vowing to bring the port to market sometime this year. For a reminder, we’ve added the company’s NAB demo after the break.
Filed under: Peripherals, Intel
Source: Intel Thunderbolt Blog
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
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.
Design-wise, the Express Dock is made to blend in perfectly with Apple’s line of Mac machines. It rocks an aluminum unibody shell with black plastic panels on the sides and back, and just like a good mullet, there’s not a lot going on in the front, but there’s a party in the back — all the ports are situated on the rear of the dock. You’ll find an ethernet port, a FireWire 800 port, three USB 3.0 ports, two Thunderbolt ports (which support daisy-chaining), and separate 3.5mm audio-out and audio-in jacks.
One of the two Thunderbolt ports is used to plug the dock into your Mac, but that’s all it takes to get access to all the other ports. Instead of having to plug all of your peripherals in one after another every time you dock your MacBook at your desk, all you have to do is plug everything into the Express Dock when setting it up, and then just simply plug in the dock into your Thunderbolt port. At that point, you’ll be all set to go. This fact alone I found really convenient as I didn’t have all these cables that I had to keep plugging and unplugging every time I wanted to undock my MacBook. It’s just one single cable and you’re good to go.
While the Express Dock will work for desktop Macs like the iMac and Mac Pro, it’s essentially meant for those with MacBooks, which don’t have a lot of options when it comes to ports, especially MacBook Air users. If you use a MacBook as your main machine and want more port options, the Express Dock is about the only convenient option out there. Simply plug in the dock into your Thunderbolt port and you’ll instantly have eight more ports at your perusal, which is pretty fantastic.
However, there are some caveats. The Express Dock doesn’t come with a Thunderbolt cable in the box, so you’ll want to make sure that you have one on hand in order to connect it to your Mac. Secondly, the Express Dock requires OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion to take advantage of all its capabilities. The dock will at least work on older versions of OS X, and I was able to hook up a Thunderbolt display to the dock, but it wouldn’t recognize any of the USB 3.0 drives that I had on hand, nor would the audio ports work. However, once I connected it to a Mountain Lion machine, everything worked flawlessly.
Another thing to keep in mind is that the USB 3.0 ports on the Express Dock are limited to 2.5Gbps, which is almost half the speed of what it’s supposed to be at (4.8Gbps). We’re not exactly sure why this is, but it’s still much faster than USB 2.0, which Macs are still sadly stuck at (unless you have one of the newest models). I also noticed that the dock would get hot after a short while, including both ends of the Thunderbolt cable. Nothing exploded, thankfully, but it was always a bit of a concern after I had it plugged in for an hour or so and had tons of things plugged into it. It never got hot enough that I couldn’t touch it, but I was certainly surprised that it gets a bit warm.
Portability is another thing to consider, especially since the dock is catered towards MacBooks. The Express Dock is lightweight and can easily fit into a backpack to take with you. However, the power adapter that’s required to power the Express Dock makes the device not too portable-friendly. It’s about the same size as a typical laptop power adapter, which isn’t a bad thing, since they’re also made to be portable along with the laptop its charging, but if you were to take both your MacBook and the Express Dock with you on the road, you now have two bulky power adapters to deal with. The dock can certainly be portable, but it’s really up to the user whether or not lugging it along will be worth it.
In the end, Belkin’s Thunderbolt Express Dock is the perfect companion to a MacBook power user. However, you’ll have to think long and hard about whether or not you truly need it, since it costs a whopping $300, so it isn’t just something that you can buy impulsively. There is a cheaper option available for $250, but that’s still a hard pill to swallow. Then again, if you’re like me and constantly find yourself docking and undocking your MacBook, dealing with a tangle of numerous wires at the same time, the Express Dock could be one of the best convenience products that you ever buy. Plus, if you’re rocking a MacBook Air and wish you had more ports at your disposal, the Express Dock is a good choice for that too.
Belkin Thunderbolt Express Dock Review is written by Craig Lloyd & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.
We caught a glimpse of the Belkin Thunderbolt Express Dock at CES 2012, and since then, the company has run the product through a redesign to make it appear a lot slimmer while also adding USB 3.0 ports to it. After much waiting, it looks like Belkin is finally ready to set its Thunderbolt Express Dock into the world as it’s now available to purchase.
As you probably already know, the Thunderbolt Express Dock comes with dual Thunderbolt ports with support of up to five Thunderbolt-supported devices, FireWire 800, Ethernet, a 3.5mm audio input and output and three USB 3.0 ports. Unfortunately, the eSATA and Mini DisplayPort to HDMI adapter didn’t make it into the final product, although seeing how its now priced at $299.99 instead of its original price of $399.99, we’re sure many of you could certainly overlook those omissions. (more…)
By Ubergizmo. Related articles: April 2013 Canon 5D Mark III Firmware Update Released, Melting Machine Gives Out Free 7Ups, 
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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.
That second Thunderbolt (the first hooking the dock up to your Mac or MacBook) means you can attach up to five more Thunderbolt devices to the same machine. As we’ve already seen, Thunderbolt’s hefty throughput – bidirectional 10Gbps, in fact – means you can have RAID arrays, Full HD displays, A/V interfaces, and more, all connected and operating simultaneously.
The dock also includes a single FireWire 800 port, handy if you’ve got legacy devices but a newer Mac which dropped the connection, and both audio-in and audio-out. In total, Belkin says, you can hook up eight devices with a single cable to your Mac.
It’s not exactly cheap for a dock, and we’re a little unimpressed that Belkin doesn’t even include the Thunderbolt cable you’ll need in order to use it. Still, if you want to make your MacBook Pro the hub of a desktop setup, it’s a straightforward way to do that without needing to hook up half a dozen cables every time you get home or into the office.
Belkin Thunderbolt Express Dock finally arrives, only seven months late is written by Chris Davies & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.
Remember the Belkin Thunderbolt Express dock that we first laid our peepers on back at CES 2012? Well, the device that looks to lend a hand to your desktop setup is now available. After upgrading the unit back in the summer of 2012, pre-orders went live in February with a ship date expected shortly thereafter. No word on the cause of the delay, but the $299 dock still offers dual Thunderbolt ports for daisy-chaining up to five gadgets, FireWire 800, Ethernet, and both 3.5mm audio input and output. If the wait hasn’t swayed your interest, grab one immediately via the source link below, and in stores before the end of May.
Filed under: Peripherals
Source: Belkin
G-Technology has just announced the spanking new G-Drive Pro that boasts of Thunderbolt capability, where this could very well be your next purchase candidate when it comes to a compact, desktop external hard drive which will offer hard drive capacity alongside the benefits of SSD-like performance. In addition, it will be able to take full advantage of the speed and power of Thunderbolt. By leveraging on G-Technology’s well-known G-Drive design, the new G-Drive Pro with Thunderbolt is capable of delivering sustained data transfer rates of up to 480MB/s, and as we all know, that would mean it is up to three times faster compared to standard issue 3.5-inch desktop external hard drives.
At this point in time, new high-resolution media formats and related files sizes do require massive amounts of storage space in addition to ever faster data transfer rates so that one can efficiently edit and distribute content throughout the workflow without being inefficient. If one were to take a look at the figures, it would be staggering. Take for example, an uncompressed 2K digital video format, that alone will take up more than one terabyte (1TB) per hour, and will require approximately 305 megabytes per second (MB/s) sustained throughput for smooth editing without experiencing any kind of dropped frames. Such high-resolution video formats, alongside the rising popularity of higher megapixel DSLR cameras which are used to capture professional 2K video, has served up a need for a new high-performance storage solution that will be able to cater to the requirements of today’s digital content creators.
The G-Drive Pro with Thunderbolt will be made available to the masses later this summer via G-Technology and its Premier Channel Partners. The asking price for the 4TB G-Drive with Thunderbolt will cost $849.95, while those who are on a tighter budget or do not have that much need for space can settle for the $699.95 2TB G-Drive Pro with Thunderbolt.
Press Release
[ G-Technology announces brand new G-Drive Pro copyright by Coolest Gadgets ]
Thunderbolt’s makin’ like greased lighting. Intel has just introduced the newest revision of the interface and it will be capable of 20Gbps in both directions (as opposed to the previous 10). In other words, fast enough to transfer and play 4K video simultaneously. And it’s all backwards compatible with old ports and cables to boot. More »
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