Thunderbolt
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127
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59
EPISODES
55
PODCASTS
Search complete. 127 mentions across 59 episodes found for "Thunderbolt".
Sep 11, 2026
Nilay PatelHOST
Last week, we were talking about the new Mac Mini and Mac Studio and Apple's very hypey press release about how they're the best computers for AI, and I said something along the lines of, "I bet Nvidia has something to say about that, because probably Nvidia chips in a desktop PC are better." And then we got 10 million comments, uh, saying I was wrong, which I appreciate.
Nilay PatelHOST
Uh, a lot of them about unified memory, some of them about daisy chaining all these Macs together on Thunderbolt.
Nilay PatelHOST
There's some reports that OpenAI and Anthropic are actually buying these devices in the tens of thousands.
Nilay PatelHOST
So I figured I should bring on someone who knows a lot about local AI and the state of the art there to explain exactly how I got this wrong and if Apple's claims are true.
7 MINS LATER
CJ TrowbridgeGUEST
Especially the idea of, like, daisy chaining, like, doing, like, multi-system clusters to do inference is insane because it's gonna run at the speed of your network, which is, like, slower than just running it off of an SSD.
CJ TrowbridgeGUEST
Like, it do- it don't-
Nilay PatelHOST
Well, Apple wants you to use Thunderbolt, which is reasonably fast, right?
CJ TrowbridgeGUEST
Uh-
Andy OthlingHOST
It's like, I'll be happy to have, I hope for another like 10 years because I'm okay.
Andy OthlingHOST
I'm on Thunderbolt three USB-C now, no dongle life.
Andy OthlingHOST
Getting rid of no dongle for your boy anymore.
Dan PechacekHOST
I'm a dongle-free boy.
Andy OthlingHOST
But, like, if that's...
Andy OthlingHOST
Hopefully, if I'm not trying to do anything crazy, like, it could...
Andy OthlingHOST
Until USB-C or Thunderbolt becomes obsolete, like, hopefully I'll be good.
Andy OthlingHOST
Like, I'm not...
Ian BrownHOST
Apple have unusually timed announcement of the new Mac Mini and Mac Studio, primarily driven by the fact that so many enterprises are now buying these things because you can chain them.
Ian BrownHOST
So we covered a few weeks ago the ability to use a Thunderbolt cable in between your Mac Minis or your Mac Studios, and you can effectively put four of them together and create one Super Mac Studio or Super Mac Mini.
Ian BrownHOST
And they are exceptionally good at running AI models because of the shared memory, the inference compute that they've got in the CPU, all that sort of stuff that they've got built into their chips.
Ian BrownHOST
So, yeah, they've basically brought out new models.
speaker_3HOST
Speicherkarte.
speaker_3HOST
An external hard drive is a larger storage device you connect via USB or Thunderbolt for extra space or backups.
speaker_3HOST
External hard drive.
speaker_3HOST
Externer Festplatte.
Nate HeathHOST
Does it
Dave BaylorHOST
do Thunderbolt at all?
Nate HeathHOST
I don't know if they do have Thunderbolt in them or not, but a fast cable.
Nate HeathHOST
But I always go back and forth on which is going to be fastest.
Nate HeathHOST
They say that...
Jon BachGUEST
And just top to bottom, it had to be a re-imagining of what it is we can do.
Jon BachGUEST
And it was a mixture of what are the needs of our customers, of course, in terms of like number of memory slots and does it need Thunderbolt and how many disks of capacities does it need? And it needs to be small.
Jon BachGUEST
And then what can we draw from to do that? And Patrick and our R&D team kind of spearheaded that both like in energy and in the actual day to day work of doing it all the way down to the training to each team to put it out.
Jon BachGUEST
And that was just a good like that was a good time where the company came together to meet a shared need.
Jeff BenjaminHOST
I just can't do it because there's two avenues you could approach this.
Jeff BenjaminHOST
Number one, you could do external drive with Thunderbolt 5.
Jeff BenjaminHOST
You have Thunderbolt 5 SSD.
Jeff BenjaminHOST
There's tons of them.
Jeff BenjaminHOST
They're super fast and it's going to be, not only is it cheaper, but you don't have to buy it right now, right? You could save up for it.
denolfeHOST
There was skepticism about Apple's motivation, with discussions on the effort required to support Linux and the strategic reasons for their secrecy.
denolfeHOST
Several users expressed hope for more support on future chips and discussed the community's ongoing efforts to enhance Linux compatibility, including GPU support, Thunderbolt, and system stability.
denolfeHOST
The overall sentiment was positive but realistic, focusing on the technical difficulties in Apple's strategic position.
denolfeHOST
Title, An Alien Mind.
AJHOST
Yeah.
AJHOST
It starts, and that's where the Thunderbolt connectivity really starts coming into its own.
AndyHOST
Amazing.
AJHOST
It really intrigues me.
John SiracusaHOST
So first of all, from Apple, they have a document called, a text support document called, Move Your Photos Library to Save Space on Your Mac.
John SiracusaHOST
And the relevant text is, Make sure that your external storage device, such as the USB drive or Thunderbolt drive, is formatted for Mac, either APFS format or macOS Extended Journal format.
John SiracusaHOST
And the published date on this is June 16th, 2026, so it's not an ancient document, okay? So they tell and there's more to the document.
John SiracusaHOST
They tell you, here's make sure you do this.
49 more episodes mention Thunderbolt.
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