We reached the smartphone and computer plateau and it's a good thing
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Also “My point is not that these machines are not generally faster”, which seems to imply it’s fast for more things they do with it (if it isn’t, or only marginally so, they should have made that argument)
How is that plateauing? And that ignores new functionality. The M1 Neural engine makes things possible that that 2013 iMac never realistically could.
Consumers have been living life under usb3 for a decade & it feels interminable but usb4 should really improve life & possibility again... If only there was a lower speed longer range spec for it, for like 5m. Or if we could get some affordable fiberoptic.
Increasing the numbers we already have(Aside from efficiency) isn't going to add any real wow factor or noticable improvement.
At this point for consumer we should focus on features. I want solar panels with waterproof USB-C that I can daisy chain or combine with hubs that have batteries, and power yard USB-C yard lights.
I want cheap thermal cameras on phones so we can see what's leaking hot air in and wasting money.
And I want LoRa mesh modules in phones and laptops so we can all make our own open source Amazon Sidewalk.
Once things became fast enough for 4K movies it was kind of enough. Unless you shuffle around terabytes of porn or pirated stuff, performance is Pretty Darn Good.
Being able to share data & video instead of have dedicated lanes eases a lot of compatibility burdens. The lack of usb-c hubs for usb3 is glaring & because this was a nightmare of lane juggling- usb's packet switching is fundamentally much more sound & should open up the peripherals availae.
Being able to direct connect to a other computer at 40Gbps should reshape our expectations for connecting.
in terms of what we are missing, the irony to me is we have it: wifi-p2p, & wifi aware! being able to adhoc talk & communicate with each other is doable with the hardware we have, but monopolized by jank, locked down, centralized top down shitmongers, which radically limits our ability to explore & own the last 0 mile of the connectivity chain: what we can do shoulder to shoulder. tech's already in devices we just dont use it!
Thunderbolt being just a small add, as opposed to something quite special, is awesome & could change things a lot.
Sure, i like many of your asks! I really like the idea of a usb-c power economy of devices. I think there's a lot of folks anticipating this kind of break open power interconnectivity. Just a matter of time for these power banks & panels to start being more power based.