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Comment by JamesBaxter | Hacker News Reader

I find Thunderbult quite useful (but I'm on a Mac). Not sure why this guy is so against it, presumably there's reasonable peripheral support on other OSes by now?

He talks about editing video on the machine, Thunderbolt should allow for high capacity/speed external storage. I'd prefer the options Thunderbolt provides over HDMI.

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I wish thunderbolt 3 worked reliably on Windows. I would much rather just have another DisplayPort port. I have to do strange things to my EFI every couple of weeks to get my P50 to recognize that I have a Thunderbolt port.

But are there any real benefits for having Thunderbult on a PC?

I have a few expensive firewire audio equipment that I can no longer use. Sure, they were faster than USB when I first bought them but now they are just paperweights. So next time I am buying high-end equipment I am going to "think different" and go with the majority (i.e. USB 3.0)...

Buy a thunderbolt monitor and you'll then realize the benefits. I plug one cable in and I have two 34" monitors running at near 4K resolution, gigabit Ethernet, external storage, and a gamut of USB3 ports. Sure, a lot of that can be done with USB3, but not all. Thunderbolt performance is significantly higher too and the cable is very solid and durable.

I think you missed my point. Firewire was also significantly faster than USB when it was announced and see where we are now. I paid extra for a laptop with Firewire ports and then paid extra for equipment that had firewire ports, they are all now expensive paperweights. I am not falling into that trap again.

Also, out of curiosity, do you believe that this laptop has the horsepower to run your 2 x 4K monitors with reasonable performance? Without the fans spinning at max speed all the time?

Not sure, but a 13" MacBook Pro w/ integrated graphics certainly does. I've only done two cinema displays with a 13" MacBook Air so sadly can't comment on it, will try that tonight if I get a second, but the specs of this put it more in the MBP category anyway.

Also, USB 3.1 and Thunderbolt 3 are merging together in a similarish fashion as how MiniDP/TB2 did, so within a few years time for adoption the point will be rather mute hopefully.

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