Apple Thunderbolt Cable Teardown Reveals Chips & Circuitry Within [Electronics Within Apple's Thunderbolt Cable May Actually Justify $50 Cost]

Posted on TFTS by J. Angelo Racoma on Wednesday, 29. June 2011 under: Computers & Computing, Devices, PCs, Notebooks, Netbooks & Tablets

iFixIt has a penchance for tearing down just about any electronic gadgetry the team can get its hands on. To satisfy our curiosity for why the Apple Thunderbolt cable costs so much, iFixIt took the cable under knife and revealed a few surprises.

You may be wondering what makes Apple’s Thunderbolt cables so expensive. It turns out that the cable is an active cable (as opposed to a cable with simple wiring inside), as earlier speculated. This supposedly helps boost up the speed. iFixIt opened up the $50 Thunderbolt cable and discovered a total of 12 identified chips and a handful of other smaller components like resistors. These include two Gennum GN2033 chip, which is supposed to have the function of ”reliable data transfer at cutting-edge speeds over low cost, thin-gauge copper cables.”

The presence of these components indicates that the Apple Thunderbolt cable is more expensive to produce than your usual USB or HDMI cable, which probably justifies the $50 cost. Now let’s see if third-party cable makers can match the design, reduce the cost and still deliver the same Thunderbolt speeds.

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