Many phones indeed only support USB 2.0. For example the base iPhone 17. The Pro does support USB 3.2, however.

> I guess everybody has given up on the idea of saving their photos and videos over USB?

Correct.

Even worse, the control plane is exposed, but for something that runs 3 Hercules mainframe emulation and two Altairs with MP/M, it’s fine.

As wireless charging never quite reached the level hoped – see AirPower – and Google/Apple seemingly bought and never did anything with a bunch of haptic audio startups, I figure that idea died....but they never cared enough to make sure the USB port remained top end.

My last two phones in the last 4 years had at least USB 3.1

Until USB has monthly service fee business to compete with cloud storage revenue.

Do you import originals or do you have the "most compatible" setting turned on?

I always assumed apple simply hated people that use windows/linux desktops so the occasional broken file was caused by the driver being sort-of working and if people complain, well, they can fuck off and pay for icloud or a mac. After upgrading to 15 pro which has 10 gbps usb-c it still took forever to import photos and the occasional broken photos kept happening, and after some research it turns out that the speed was limited by the phone converting the .heic originals into .jpg when transferring to a desktop. Not only does it limit the speed, it also degrades the quality of the photos and deletes a bunch of metadata.

After changing the setting to export original files the transfer is much faster and I haven’t had a single broken file / video. The files are also higher quality and lower filesize, although .heic is fairly computationally-demanding.

Idk about Android but I suspect it might have a similar behavior

I’m using Dropbox for syncing photos from phone to Linux laptop, and mounting the SDcard locally for cameras, so this is a guess.