You’re right! The trapped ion approach (IonQ) is the most promising direction toward scalable quantum computing. Superconducting qubits — such as those used by IBM and Google — require extreme cooling while ions can be trapped at room temperature. Superconducting qubits are also plagued by substrate imperfections, while trapped ions — being “nature’s qubits” — are absolutely identical in their quantum mechanical properties. This allows trapped ion quantum computers to realize the best demonstrated gate fidelities.

I still need to be convinced that the exponential power of n qubits grows faster than the exponential complexity of aligning, programming and reading n qubits.