Thomas Brand on Apple’s Thunderbolt Display:
If I sat down with Apple’s Thunderbolt Display earlier I would have never bought a 13 inch MacBook Pro instead of a MacBook Air. I compromised and got the Pro because it was the lightest laptop available with all of the ports my job required. With a MacBook Air and a Thunderbolt Display I could have had the lightest Mac ever made, with all of the ports I need, and zero compromises. The Thunderbolt Display lets you have the best of both worlds. A fully connected large screen desktop, and a ultraportable laptop.
The whole concept behind the Thunderbolt Display — a device that is basically a one-cable connector dock that turns your laptop into a desktop — reminds me a lot of Tim Van Damme’s pre-iPad concept of a dockable tablet.
And so now I’m wondering if one day we’ll see some sort of Thunderbolt connection for our iPad and/or iPhone that would turn our iDevices into full-fledged laptops or desktops.
In a sense I suppose that is what iCloud is doing by cutting the cord and allowing our documents and media to sync over the air across our devices. But I wonder if one day there will be a hardware-type unification similar to the software-type unification that iCloud will be bringing. A way to buy one single device (an iPad) that can be used as-is, and also amplified by connecting it to additional hardware. Just a thought…