According to that alleged Steve Jobs e-mail we read earlier this week, Macs probably won’t be featuring USB 3.0 ports anytime soon. Could Apple have something grander in mind? CNet News cites an "industry source familiar with the progress of the technology" as saying the first products based on Intel’s Light Peak interface will show up in early 2011… and Apple may number among the early adopters.
An early 2011 arrival for the technology would be a little ahead of schedule. While various prototypes were on display at the Intel Developer Forum in September, the technology release time frame for them was, at the time, said to be "sometime next year."
Light Peak promises quicker transfer speeds than USB 3.0—10Gbps for the current implementation, with room for growth—as well as the potential to serve as a replacement for both external and internal connectivity, from PCI Express to HDMI. At least to me, Light Peak definitely sounds like something Apple would be interested in adopting before everybody else. The firm has a history of trailblazing on the connectivity front (think FireWire and Mini DisplayPort), and this isn’t the first sign. Intel has already publicly demonstrated Light Peak running on an OS X system.