I still desperately wish the industry had been able to push through to an optical data + plain power interconnect standard ages ago instead of it falling apart. It's so pleasant to deal with fiber. The same OS2 or OM3 I installed over a decade ago for 10 Gbps is still fine for 40 or 100 Gbps. Cost was a complaint at one point, yet even without the enormous economies of scale a general standard would bring price and performance lines have ended up converging anyway. 40G SR (so still good to 150m) modules are now at $40 or less, even 100G is less than $100. Putting that onto simpler fiber instead of MTP/MPO with SFP56 remains much more expensive, a 50G-SR is still like $280, but that appears to primarily be a product of it being very new and not yet scaled, not that it couldn't have been years ago. And that still then runs to 100m with duplex LC.

Meanwhile, Apple wants $70 a pop for a single, 1m Thunderbolt 4 cable, and that's only been increasing. What will Thunderbolt 5 be? Corning and I think one other briefly did optical Thunderbolt cables, but those were $500-1000. Whereas premade quality duplex OM4 with helical steel armor runs more like $2.20/meter.

Feels like we somehow ended up in a yet another technology path dependent evolution path where decisions that saved a bit at the time have then imposed major costs forever more :(. Man it'd be so cool to just be able to run a screen and input boxes hundreds of feet away from a workstation for $60, or have an $8-12 cable be good for decades of evolution in bandwidth barring regular wear (and when it's that cheap who cares even if it breaks after 5 years?), or be able to route displays/TVs and PCIe and whatever else around like any other networking with no compromises. Sigh.