I still can't figure out who would buy this given that name brand, active, 2m Thunderbolt 4 cables go for under $60. And generic brand 2m cables that are tested and well reviewed for under $40.

I’ll happily pay a lot of premium for a long “just works” TB3/4 cable so I can pretend I live in a world where cables aren’t themselves computers and don’t have complicated sets of features they do or don’t support

Linus Tech Tips has done some good breakdowns of specific cables so far (with a multi thousand dollar testing rig). They're ramping up to do full testing of all types of cables.

You're right, lots of cables don't do what they say. And it isn't just Thunderbolt. It's HDMI, DisplayPort, USB3, etc. Lots of the HDMI 2.1 cables they tested can only do HDMI 2.0, for instance. Not an issue with Macs, but an issue for lots of Windows gaming rigs.

Exactly. A ~2x premium to make all of that Someone Else's Problem is worth it.

It's a 3x premium over the cables you'd possibly need to be concerned about. The $60 cables just work.

Hmm. My last engagement on this front was before TB4, seems like the situation has markedly improved!

This is a five-foot-long PCIe x4 cable - GPU extensions are four inches. It can feed two 4K displays at 60Hz. It can transfer data faster than an NVMe drive can store it. The fact that this is even physically possible is astounding.

It is. But it's also possible with the $40 and $60 cables I mentioned. They're all active Thunderbolt 4 40Gb/s cables that measure about 2 meters long.

I guarantee it's not the wire that's making it possible.