Lion will drop support for earliest Intel Macs..

[HCMarkus]

I like SixString's approach, but it IS hard to resist the temptation to go for the latest and the greatest when new software comes along. (Seeing that I am still running Tiger with DP, I guess I have some self control ) Though Lion may require the newest Macs, I doubt DP is going to require Lion for at least a few more years.

[James Steele]

I would think a bigger issue would be when Thunderbolt (Lightpeak) makes it to towers as it has on the new Mac laptops. Will it become standard on Windows machines too? And if so, then we might see a whole slew of new audio devices and interfaces based on this technology. Would it be what mLan was supposed to be? And with everything going in the box, will we need to be interfacing as much external hardware?

[SixStringGeek]

I would think a bigger issue would be when Thunderbolt (Lightpeak) makes it to towers as it has on the new Mac laptops. Will it become standard on Windows machines too? And if so, then we might see a whole slew of new audio devices and interfaces based on this technology?

All good questions but I think there's a couple years to sort it out. Biggest PITA for hardware developers like MOTU is the machines have no USB3 ports - basically killing the idea that USB3 is the next port to support. Seems USB3 may well be stillborn.

The standard is Intel's so, unlike FireWire - there's no Apple-proprietary stigma. With luck the PC people will fall into line but if they don't, there's no reason you can't run USB3 over the Thunderbolt bus (or FireWire) which means I expect we'll be seeing dock strips/hubs that basically provide a bunch of interfaces merged into a Thunderbolt interface.

So long as there is an adaptation strategy and it isn't ubiquitous I would expect device makers to drag their feet about supporting it.

[Frodo]

So long as there is an adaptation strategy and it isn't ubiquitous I would expect device makers to drag their feet about supporting it.

That's the part of it that I'll no longer succumb to--- dragging their feet. So many developers I trusted dragged their feet on so many levels. If USB3 is not the cat's meow for both PC and Mac, then whatever the next connection innovation is, it must be cross-platform to make sense. No longer can PC go in one direction and Mac go in another where hardware connectivity is concerned and expect to reign supreme.

It can't even be about reigning supreme any more. It MUST be about being able to buy a peripheral and having it work no matter what machine is in use at this point. Who wants to buy a new machine now and then wait a year or two for peripherals to get up to speed.... or to find that all current, fully-functional peripherals are suddenly obsolete or otherwise unsupported?

[mhschmieder]

Avid/Digidesign saw the light. We seem to go through cycles in the industry where cooperation and agreeing upon common standards (where there is no real competitive advantage to going separate ways, in the bigger scheme of things), rotates with selfish and paranoid go-it-alone strategies.

The car industry probably went through similar growing pains before standardizing on the stuff that frankly didn't help as much as hurt when buyers weighed the pros and cons of one brand vs. another. I think I read somewhere that it takes most industries about 50 years to come to an agreement about the areas where they will share protocols and standards vs. where they will turf it out in a battle to the death.

[mikehalloran]

>The car industry probably went through similar growing pains before standardizing on the stuff<

That was forced on them by the Bureau of Standards. The Bureau has an interesting museum in Washington DC - it's where you go in the morning to get tickets to tour the White House.