Prices of Thunderbolt Cables Likely to Drop in 2013

Now all we need is some less expensive stuff to plug it in to...

"Prices of Thunderbolt Cables Likely to Drop in 2013"

I don't mean to be a bit negative but...

"Prices of Anything Related to Technology Likely to Drop in 2013"

would most likely also work.

Nope. Still a dinosaur.

Hands up how many of you own a Thunderbolt peripheral >2 years since launch?

Launch was February 24, 2011 with the Early 2011 MacBook laptop refresh.

PC manufacters have been very slow to adopt, however perhaps it will gain traction. Although it's superior I can see it taking FireWires place as 2nd to USB3.

Actually, given how strong Thunderbolt seems to be, I think it could easily be an industry standard if they could drop the price.
Picture this: in the year 2015, the ONLY ports on most computers are USB 3.0 and Thunderbolt. You no longer have a need for VGA, DVI, HDMI, FireWire, or even Ethernet. All of those could be run through Thunderbolt and suddenly it's much easier to connect devices to computers. Yes, it would certainly take a long time to adopt the technology like that, but it sounds like a convenient world once fully adopted, doesn't it?

When is Monster Cable going to release a Thunderbolt cable?

As soon as a $200 cable is marketable.

There are no optical T-Bolt cables at any speed. You are quoting roadmap and theoretical numbers. And "multi-path" is questionable - a T-Bolt chain is single-path.

Fail.

Are you talking about T-Bolt 2.0 or T-Bolt 3.0?

T-Bolt 1.0 does not support optical cables - but there are certain vaporware noises about connectors with Cu-Optical transceivers in the cable for longer cable runs at copper speeds - but each end is a copper connection.

This is a liability, not an asset. Daisy chains are pure suck - since you often have to shut the system down to remove or insert a device in the middle

As usual, you're wrong about everything, and have the audacity to proclaim "fail" about the statements of others.

Sumitomo makes optical Thunderbolt cables. They've been available for a while now. Sumitomo also manufactures several of the other Thunderbolt cables that have recently come to market (Elgato, Belkin), but they don't sell direct in the US. Yes the optical transceiver is housed in the cable connector, right where it should be for a consumer device. It keeps the price of everything lower for those that don't need the range of optical, it keeps a potentially dangerous laser device out of harm's way, and doesn't require any expensive, easily damaged or contaminated lenses in the connector.

The speed of Thunderbolt is entirely determined by the controller. Thus far all controllers on the market are 10 Gbps, full-duplex, per channel. All cables are dual channel, and thus multi-path.

The copper implementation of Thunderbolt is actually twice the bandwidth of the optical versions that were demoed as Light Peak. Those only offered a single 10 Gbps channel, rather than the two that are standard with Thunderbolt. Short of silicon photonics, there is always an electrical/optical boundary, and your semantical arguments about the significance of where this boundary lies are pointless. For now, economics and practicality will determine where they are.

Also, the requirement of Thunderbolt devices to be hot-pluggable means that daisy chaining isn't much of a liability, unless you are silly enough to boot off of a device that isn't at or near the beginning of the chain. But then again, you're welcome to voice your opinion that daisy chains suck. At least that isn't patently false, like most of the other troll-bait claims you make.

The prices of the actual hardware are so expensive this won't really make any difference in the popularity of such products...

Really needed in new Mac Pros first ....

The thing with Thunderbolt is, it's a high-end standard, suitable for power user/pro user needs more than anything else.

I could easily see this getting utilized by video editors, for example, who might want to pump uncompressed 1080p resolution video through it in large quantities. For them, the projects they're working on, not to mention the cameras they'd attach such a cable to, make the price of the cable rather irrelevant.

Problem is ... we don't even have a Mac Pro tower with the connector on it yet!

PC manufacters have been very slow to adopt, however perhaps it will gain traction. Although it's superior I can see it taking FireWires place as 2nd to USB3.

I own over a thousand dollars worth of TB

Wow, you own a whole external drive! ;)

I own over a thousand dollars worth of TB peripherals.

Are there many TB peripherals under a thousand dollars? :)