Windows laptops are now planning to take a leaf out of Apple's book. Major laptop manufacturers including Acer, Lenovo and Asustek
are now planning to include Thunderbolt port to their upcoming ultrabooks. These ultrabooks are expected to be introduced in the second quarter of 2012 and these machines will run on Intel's Ivy Bridge platform.
PC industry is also making efforts to bring Thunderbolt to masses. Gigabyte technology is looking to manufacture Thunderbolt-friendly motherboards. Thunderbolt ports will make appearance in middle-range and upper range PCs. While you will be able to lay your hands on a Thunderbolt PC by second quarter of the year, the mechanism is likely to be standardized by 2013 only.
The main impediment in the way of mass adoption of technology is its high cost. Thereby, only high tier models are expected to support the technology initially. Thunderbolt technology employs two communication protocols which are PCI express and DisplayPort. PCI express is used for data transmission and DisplayPort is used for displaying images. This protocol allows users to connect different devices using only one port.
Apple was one of the first major companies to adopt this technology. Apple offers Thunderbolt port on its computers. Some news suggest that Apple would be expanding the use of this technology to iOS devices as well.