Hasta La Gadget!

The 12 chips inside Apple’s Thunderbolt cable might justify its high, high price. Photos iFixit

It might not mitigate the ridiculous $50 price-tag, but iFixit’s teardown of Apple’s “lightning fast” Thunderbolt cable at least goes some way towards showing why it doesn’t cost the same as any other dumb cable.

After picking up the new wonder-cable and digging into its “suspicious” looking sturdy plastic sleeve, iFixit’s Miroslav Djuric was confronted with a lot of hefty metal shielding. One soldering iron and a bit of chopping later and he was in.

So what’s inside: The cable contains 12 individual chips, almost as many chips as the Smart Cover has magnets, plus a (small) handful of sundry resistors and other electronic-y type bits. The main brains seem to be in the two Gennum GN2033 chips, one in each end. The GN2033 is the “[i]ndustry’s first in-connector 10Gb/s transceiver chip for Thunderbolt.”

It would seem that a Thunderbolt cable is in fact a tiny computer.

So that, I’d guess, is where your money is going. Apple has actually been cutting the costs of cables recently, most famously with the $20 HDMI cable which managed to undercut pretty much everyone else when it was introduced. I’m not saying there isn’t a decent profit margin on the Thunderbolt cable — there surely is — but at least you’re getting something other than copper strands and plastic for your cash.

What Makes the Thunderbolt Cable Lightning Fast [iFixit]

See Also:

• Apple Releases Thunderbolt Cable. Now All We Need Are Thunderbolt …
• How Thunderbolt Could Hook Up Notebooks With Powerful Peripherals …