News: optical Thunderbolt cables, Safari 5.1.4, Sonora for Mac, and more

Up until now Thunderbolt hasn't seen the mass adoption that Apple would like, and apart from a few expensive peripherals, consumers don't see any reason to buy Thunderbolt peripherals over USB ones. That said, it looks as though Thunderbolt is here to stay, with Intel planning to release optical Thunderbolt cables sometime later this year. Current Thunderbolt connections have a bandwidth limit of about 10Gbps, but optical cables might push that up to around 100Gbps, as well as providing an distance advantage — conventional cables max out at around 6m, with optical cables operating at tens of meters. Apple has released Safari 5.1.4 which contains many fixes for the web browser that ships with every Mac. The list of updates is actually quite long and covers a wide variety of categories, but the fix includes things such as improved Javascript performance, better stability, compatibility and start-up time of Safari extensions, along with a whole host of other fixes too numerous to name briefly.

ITunes replacements for playing music are becoming more and more common, which is how Beautiful Pixels starts their review of Sonora, a simple, beautiful and elegant audio player for your Mac.

Driver San Francisco is available on the Mac. If you're buying it from Steam (or if you already own the Windows version) you get the two versions for the one price, thanks to their SteamPlay feature.