With thunderbolt you get superfast data transfer speeds and huge expansion capabilities it features two 10 gbps data channels per port which means data transfer is up to twice as fast as usb 3 and up to 12 times faster than firewire 800 use the apple thunderbolt cable to connect your thunderbolt equipped peripherals to your imac mac mini macbook pro or macbook air the cable can also be used for target disk mode between two mac computers that support thunderbolt or to use an imac as a