It definitely serves as a differentiation between Pro and base, and I'm sure they'll get some additional pro upgrades by people just looking at a piece of paper and deciding that they must have USB 3.
However the lack of USB 3 IO on the existing chip from last year is a very real limitation. The Raspberry Pi 4 supports USB 3 via a separate host controller (the VL805) communicated with over PCI-e, given that the core SoC doesn't have the IO blocks...basically the same deal. That VL805 by itself is almost the size of the A16. Now of course Apple could make a USB 3 host controller dramatically smaller, but then they'd have a new SoC.
>It's not a matter of a dedicated processor block on the chip.
Yes it is. Itβs just rare for any modern SoC to leave out an XHCI controller, which the Pi and countless others have in their SoC. Apple was an outlier
FWIW the A16 Bionic and earlier have a USB block, they just don't have a USB 3.0 block. They added one in the A17, probably porting over from the M1/M2.
For that matter, neither does the BCM2711 on the RPi4. It leans on an external chip -- almost as large as it -- for USB 3.0 functionality.
And the raspberry pi has USB 3.0 for god's sake! It's not a matter of a dedicated processor block on the chip.
<english is a second language to me, this is intended as humourous, not aggressive>