While a bit of a tangent, I also love how Apple likes to make this EVEN MORE confusing by not supporting displayport MST in MacOS, causing most thunderbolt 4 docks on the market to be incapable of supporting multiple monitors when using MacOS.

So if you have say a 16" MacBook Pro, you need to get not only Thunderbolt 4 which is a rare spec, you want to ideally get ~85-140w PD not ~60w, AND you need to get an expensive dock that can split up the two HBR3 displayport channels instead of a regular MST Thunderbolt 4 dock.

Thankfully Apple has a solution to consumer confusion caused by all this. Buy a $1600 Apple studio display, connect it directly to your Mac, use the monitor itself as a dock, and everything will be compatible. Stay in the safe walled garden.

IF only USB had some sort of standard committee that could disallow that sort of thing…

It is true that Apple makes thunderbolt support more difficult. A 6 years old XPS 13 supports 3 monitors with TB3 while you meed an M1 Max to support that configuration.

Surprised Apple didn’t go with thunderbolt. I wonder if they are worried about Intel’s licensing or something. It seems more apple-like to go with the higher performance, more straightforward standard.

USB-C is a mess. Whoever decided to fix the annoying compatibility issues of USB mini/micro/blah blah by just solving the physical port problem should never be consulted on anything again.

EU compelled the USB C standard, apple had to switch. I for one am glad they did.

I mean... do you really need thunderbolt for a phone? Are you powering multiple 8k displays and daisey chaining a hub connected to an external raid storage array?

I get that it would be cool. For the ipad i think it makes sense to do that, but your phone...? Let's get real. Fast charging over a standardized cable with 10gbs transfer speeds is gonna be just fine.

the pro 14s and 15s are plenty fast and could be used as work horses for a lot (most office work I'd wager) with a KBM and an external display. the only issue is it'd be kinda hard to take calls without a headset, but that's a good reason to take your old iphone out of the drawer, right? ;)

The main use case I've heard is video transfers.

If you shoot videos longer than a few seconds on your iPhone, you will appreciate a way to get them off of your phone at a non-glacial pace.

For professionals shooting significant amounts of video, this is more than a convenience feature. Once your device's internal storage fills up with video, which does not take long at 4K60, now your "camera" is a paperweight until you can dump that footage.

Obviously, only a very small percentage of people are using their phones this way. But I think Apple really values that market.

Forcing people to buy $100 Thunderbolt cables just to charge their phones would not go over well