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.
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Thunderbolt 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.
Top Rated Comments
If you've known about it for a week, it would have been helpful if you'd told us about it at any point. :)
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.