I spoke to a Buffalo Technologies guy at Macworld who seemed pretty up on USB3 in the marketplace. He correctly said most new mid to high end motherboards will have USB3 in 2010 and ASUS has recently purchased 5,000 Buffalo USB3 modules for testing their USB3 motherboards. He said other companies have been purchasing their technology for testing as well (without going into detail but with that “knowing look”). Also, he noted that Snow Leopard has native support baked in for USB3, so it seems like it is on Apple’s radar. What better machine to put the new backwards compatible 10-pin connectors into than MacBook Pros? Most unlikely, but ever so interesting: Intel released their new WiDi Wireless display technology at CES this year. It requires Core i3/i5/i7 processors and Intel motherboards (so no NVIDIA). The technology itself is supposed to be for Windows 7 64-bit only, but wouldn’t it be nice to see something like this on MacBooks? It basically compresses HD video and sends the signal over 802.11N Wifi to a node on the network which then connects via HDMI to a display. We’d love to see this type of technology on our MacBooks. Wouldn’t you?
