A lot of people have been disappointed over Apple's lack of interest in the USB 3.0 standard, but thanks to a little bird, VR-Zone has heard that the company is still looking at USB 3.0 as a potential feature to add on future products. As to when and how this might happen is not something we know, but from our understanding it'll happen before Intel integrates USB 3.0 support into its chipsets.
Sadly we can't reveal all the information at hand, as not only would we cause problems for our source, but also the entire company in question, but suffice to say, Apple has been looking into USB 3.0 host controllers, especially as the price has finally reached an affordable level. A USB 3.0 host controller is priced at somewhere between US$2-3 in large quantities today which should be compared to US$10-15 for Intel's Thunderbolt chip. It's also important to remember that Thunderbolt not only requires a host chip, but also a device chip and additional chips on the device end depending on the type of device. This makes Thunderbolt a very expensive solution for simple storage device etc.
Apple to adopt USB 3.0?
Posted on Friday, September 02 2011 @ 22:10 CEST by Thomas De Maesschalck