Thunderbolt Port Trademarked By Apple, Where Does That Leave Intel?

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Thunderbolt is the next-generation universal port from Intel with help from Apple. You may know it by the code name it was under during development, Light Peak. The story goes that Intel developed Light Peak for Apple, although both companies claimed that wasn’t true. So, if it isn’t true, why has Apple been caught trademarking Thunderbolt? Does this mean that Thunderbolt will be an Apple-only port?

Yep, Apple has filed for a trademark for the term “Thunderbolt” in connect to computers and computer peripherals. So, where does this leave Thunderbolt? It was assumed that Thunderbolt and USB 3.0 were heading towards a format war worthy of Blu-Ray/HD-DVD or VHS/BetaMax. Apple and Intel have been chatting up Light Peak/Thunderbolt while other manufacturers have been concerned with USB 3.0 (and Intel’s lack of support for the new generation of the USB format that they helped standardize.)

Considering that recent pictures of the “Sony Ultimate Mobile PC” showed that computer using Thunderbolt/Light Peak with a USB connector – not the Mini DisplayPort port that Apple uses for Thunderbolt on the MacBook Pro/iMac, it’s now being speculated by tech bloggers that Apple will use Mini DisplayPort and push for that to be the “port” for Thunderbolt while other companies will push for the USB interface.

Apple owns the Mini DisplayPort interface (as opposed to the regular DisplayPort interface, which is offered royalty-free to all manufacturers). I would conjecture that Apple will put their weight behind using Mini DisplayPort as a Thunderbolt interface. They’ll put it on every Mac and Apple product (iPhone, iPad, etc.). Folks will either buy a Mac, or they’ll buy a Windows PC with a Mini DisplayPort/Thunderbolt and Apple will get their cut that way. That’s how I see it going down. Sounds like a repeat of the Firewire fiasco that Apple tried back in the late 1990s/early 2000s. Will it work this time, who knows?

And will PC manufacturers even both supporting Light Peak? Most of them have pledged support for USB 3.0. Sony is the only one who has shown any interest in Light Peak, and HP (who is the largest computer manufacturer in the world) has already announced that they will not be pursuing Light Peak in favor of USB 3.0.

So yes, it looks like we’ll see Light Peak ports called Thunderbolt ports on Apple products using the Mini DisplayPort interface while we’ll see it called something else and probably using the USB port on PCs. Annoying? Yes. Confusing? Yes. Should we all just use USB 3.0? I’ll let you decide that.