Apple Revamps Thunderbolt Cable Lineup with Lower Pricing, Shorter Cable Option

As noted by 9to5Mac, Apple today revamped its Thunderbolt cable lineup, dropping the price of the existing 2-meter cable from $49 to $39 and adding a new 0.5-meter cable priced at $29.

apple thunderbolt cablesThunderbolt cables remain relatively expensive due to the electronics included inside the cables to manage the multiple protocols supported by the standard. The complexity and expense has both slowed deployment of Thunderbolt peripherals and limited support mostly to high-end devices capable of absorbing the high cost premium.

Thunderbolt cables have so far been limited to traditional copper cabling, but vendors are just beginning production on optical cables for the standard. The optical cables will allow for much longer cable lengths, but will not be able to provide power to peripherals as copper cables can.

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Top Rated Comments

ollyb Avatar
163 months ago
Cool. I'll buy one of these to connect to my.... nothing.
Score: 63 Votes (Like | Disagree)
topmounter Avatar
163 months ago
The guy at Best Buy told me the gold-plated ones are at least 100x faster.
Score: 43 Votes (Like | Disagree)
charlieegan3 Avatar
163 months ago
Shorter cable, same massive markup.
Score: 26 Votes (Like | Disagree)
WildCowboy Avatar
163 months ago
This has been available for about a week. Come on guys.

If you've known about it for a week, it would have been helpful if you'd told us about it at any point. :)
Score: 23 Votes (Like | Disagree)
SDAVE Avatar
163 months ago
Thunderbolt is a dead non-starter. USB3 is on course to win the fight.
Not good for us.

TB can become a FireWire port, a Gigabit Port, an extension for the PCIe port to expand graphic card capabilities, etc, not to mention connect to a display and the display becomes a hub, etc.

USB3.0 cannot.

TB is a PCIe extension directly connected to the motherboard, kind of like the now dead ExpressCard.
Score: 20 Votes (Like | Disagree)
Drinahn Avatar
163 months ago
Chill out peasants. It's only 50 bucks. If it offends you that much go buy something else.
Score: 17 Votes (Like | Disagree)