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Comment by jordanroher | Hacker News Reader

I wonder if Apple will eventually replace the dock connector on the iPhone/iPad with Thunderbolt? That would be a compelling reason to upgrade: your music sync time would be freed of another bottleneck.

Of course, it kind of messes with the third-party accessory market, but I'm sure they'd love another reason to get people to buy new stuff.

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Ever try to buy a car mount for an iPhone? :) Mine came with about 10 different plastic snap-on mounting brackets. Apple could give a crap about the third party accessory market.

The big issue with replacing any iOS connectors with desktop standard connectors is power. Thunderbolt specifies 10W of power; USB specifies 2.5W; the Camera Connection Kit only supplies 0.5W. I doubt that Apple is going to ship anything that provides much more power than that.

Thunderbolt may work thru the 30 pin conector, needs four lanes of copper. We should know Tuesday if they do it with the iPad 2.

I'm no hardware engineer, but I'd imagine a new iPad would integrate a Thunderbolt controller in a similar manner to how the older iPods integrated a FireWire controller.

Also remember that the doc connector is a revenue source. I'm having trouble finding a source right now, but if I am remembering right Apple sells the actual dock connectors to accessory makers.

Pretty sure that Apple's dock connector is sold directly by JAE -- it's the 'DD1' listed here: http://www.jae-connector.com/en/general_en.cfm?series_code=D...

You can't just get them from JAE, you have to license the male plug thru Apple and it's a big process. And Apple lets no one but Apple use the female 30 pin plug.

License under what legal theory? It doesn't seem like a fairly ordinary plug would meet the standards for either patent or copyright.

I don't know, but there is a reason no other manufacturers use it. And its a massive legal and due diligence process to get into the Made for iPod program which gives you all the specs and supplies the connectors, along with charging royalties.

http://developer.apple.com/programs/mfi

Yep, Apple charges royalty on the 30 pin conector, which varies in cost depending on what it's used for. You have to be enrolled in Apple's MiFi program too. Apple makes money everywhere.

I heard apple charges $4 per unit.

Sparkfun sells male and female connectors: http://www.sparkfun.com/categories/101

I doubt it, PCIe (apparently the main underlying protocol) isn't a common feature of ARM SoC systems.

Even if it's not part of ARM's reference designs, could Apple integrate it into a future A-series chip?

This goes beyond my knowledge of hardware design, but I suspect there's no fundamental reason preventing it. The signal processing at those sort of clock rates may however consume more power than is practical - I don't know.

PCIe essentially trades greater hardware complexity for lower power requirements (and higher performance). Original PCI is similar in this regard (that also reduced number of required external passive components on motherboards compared to ISA).

So if anything prevents usage of PCIe in embedded devices it's added complexity, not power requirements. By the way electrical interface of most modern true-color TFT panels is identical on the lowest layer to PCIe (and SATA and who knows what else).

Marvell's cores have one lane of PCI express. Check out the OpenRD: http://www.open-rd.org/

I'm pretty sure the dock connector isn't going anywhere anytime soon, though I could see a Dock-to-Thunderbolt cable optionally replacing the Dock-to-USB cable.

The dock connector is actually wide enough to allow the device to dock! So don't expect it to go away while docking is a priority for Apple's design decisions.

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