Light Peak “ready to go” says Intel http://tinyurl.com/2vdqoyu

So Light Peak was going to be all Fiber but delayed, so now we “only” have a copper version that puts 10 Gpbs. To put that in context:

eSATA is 3 Gbps

Fiber Channel is evolving from 4 to 6 Gbps

FireWire is currently at best 800 Mbps

USB 3 – still becoming established – is 3 Gbps.

A single Light Peak connector could cary the same data as three USB 3 connectors, while carrying the data from a FireWire 800 interface as well, because Light Peak has been designed to carry all these (and Ethernet) data types (apparently simultaneously).

And suddenly you no longer need a tower model in your lineup that has space for internal cards: now everything connects via one or more Light Peak connectors. Imagine a future laptop that has a single Light Peak connector with optional adapter or break-out box to whatever connectors an individual user might need. I’d take an adapter that gave me a USB 3 for storage, another for HD-SDI  ingest and a couple of FW 800 ports. Someone else might just want to run a 6Gbps adapter to the current Fiber Channel storage network.

It really doesn’t matter whether you”re using a laptop design with 2 or 4 cores, or a compact box housing two six-core processors and attendant RAM, once you add one or two Light Peak ports to the host design (and power) you like and you have access to faster-than-you-need connectivity, whatever connectivity you need.

And you have a very, very elegant laptop with only one or two very small connectors. What company is it that really likes simplicity and elegance in its designs?