pleeease??
i have tried to read the blurb but i dont quite get it..what is it?

A new standard for transfering data between devices.

It uses a special cable with a microchip at each end – this pair of chips intelligently optimise the wavelength for transmitting data, hence the high speeds. Known as an ‘active cable’, as opposed to the regular ‘passive cable’ like USB, ethernet, etc.

It’s currently an apple-only thing, IIRC.

Thunderbolt is a new accessory port, developed by Intel and Apple among others, that is significantly quicker than USB2.0 – something like 10Gbps

It has a similar design to Firewire, in that you can daisy chain devices together and have one hard disk plugged into another and then into your computer. Oh – and there are thunderbolt monitors now appearing, too. So, you could have one thunderbolt cable from your laptop to your monitor and then multiple devices plugged into that. I believe Apple just brought a monitor out that provides lots of USB ports that are then sent down the thunderbolt cable to the laptop.

You’ll only find it on Apple computers for the first year, though….

Rachel

http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2011/06/why-apples-2m-thunderbolt-cable-costs-a-whopping-50.ars

whopping $50? – some people pay that for an HDMI cable !

Developed by Intel but with some collaboration with Apple. It’s pretty much an open standard but Apple have jumped right into it so peripheral manufacturers and other system builders are taking a bit of time to catch up.

It is essentially a very high-speed, daisy-chainable interface that uses a nice compact cable. Apple’s current implementation of it uses the mini-DisplayPort type connector, but it can carry all sorts of other stuff besides video. It’s in effect an extension of the PCI Express bus, which has traditionally been internal to computers – it gives the possibility of interesting stuff like having your graphics card in an external box, so your nice slim and light laptop could be hooked up at home and turn into a gaming powerhouse.

As allthegear says, Apple have released a new 27″ monitor that has USB2, gigabit ethernet, audio, Firewire 800, etc built in – as well as another Thunderbolt port for plugging in other things. You just plug in a single cable and all that stuff gets presented to your Mac.

I know PC cynics will point at the docking stations that have been around for donkeys years, but this is doing it all over a single, compact, standardised cable – not some proprietary port on the bottom that often changes between models, let alone manufacturers.