Originally Posted By: wfaulk
I really wish Apple would get its head out of its ass and develop a laptop with docking station.

And, yes, Tom, I know that Thunderball "solves" this problem, but, you know, it doesn't. For one thing, it would be nice for Andy to be able to have a docking station with an additional video card in it, so he can do exactly what he's asking for.

I dunno, maybe there's enough bandwidth in Goldfinger to make an external docking station feasible
:-P

I do still think this solves it. Because Thunderbolt is just PCIe, it's technically feasible for someone to build a true, universal "docking station" that works with just the one plug, and has a PCIe slot or two inside. PCIe v1 1x bandwidth is 2gbit, so the Thunderbolt connection is equivalent to an 5x slot (if such a thing existed). Video cards can run just fine on a 4x v1 bus, though there might be some slight slowdown in some very specific gaming benchmarks that do a ton of main memory to GPU memory transfers. Once Thunderbolt makes a jump to 100gbit, then it will exceed the bandwidth of even a 16x 2.0 PCIe slot, and be close to the 128gbit rate of a PCIe 3.0 16x slot. And as I theorized earlier, with the DisplayPort signal also there, it would be possible for that external card to also drive the internal laptop LCD, something not possible with older docking station setups. The iMacs already have DisplayPort in and out via the one connector, even before Thunderbolt.

Does it solve the power issue? No. So I suppose it doesn't quite meet your exact demands of being as lazy as possible when getting into work every day smile But it does resolve the cost issue of not needing a new docking station every time the vendor decides to change the highly proprietary docking connector.
Originally Posted By: andy
or at least I would if Dell hadn't changed the docking station interface and so I need a new £200+ docking station frown

It is possible Apple will solve this to your satisfaction though, as they have a recent patent filing for your idea of a combo MagSafe and optical interface.

The downside to this method is that it stops being any vendor with Thunderbolt notebook universal, and will only work with Apple notebooks. But I suppose this isn't different then the current situation people are in with docking stations. I'm just really surprised it took this long to have a good standard for external PCI busses, since laptop docks have had their proprietary ways of doing this for well over a decade now. Expresscard and the older CardBus never worked for this purpose for some reason.

(sadly couldn't come up with any clever Bond jokes for my reply, but nice job on the references in your post. Thunderbolt has me thinking about the Thundercats theme for some reason. )