USB 3.2 will Absorb the USB 3.0 and 3.1 standards

I wish we could just have one standard for everything external that needs a cable. One cable to rule them all... But it's probably never gonna happen
 
Thunderbolt 3 has the same practical speed as USB 3.2 Gen2x2 atm with most on market controllers & cables, both use the theoretical maximum number of lanes with the maximum theoretical transfer rate per lane with current high end Type-C cables(You need pretty short & thick cables to hit T3's theoretical max with copper), and both are designed to be usable simultaneously with the USB Power Delivery spec for upto 100W of power on active cables, but obviously they go about it in different ways suited for different applications, Thunderbolt could never be the defacto standard though because the reason USB maintains all the lower speed modes as part of the most recent specs is because for many devices the higher speed versions would blow the power budget massively while generally being massively overkill for the realistic transfer speeds from most hardware while also adding significantly to unnecessary cost.

Similarly, this is the thing stopping us from having truly cross compatible cables, for many applications a full-featured USB Type-C cable is overkill, particularly for just charging devices & stuff, and in order to keep costs reasonable bundled cables will often only provide the traditional USB2.0 spec wires within the Type-C cable or similar, but fortunately labeling is getting better for that.
 
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Thunderbolt will never become standard because it's proprietary and Apple/Intel will not open it up for non-Intel certified hardware, cancelling out most of their competition immediately.

USB has been adopted in too many industry sectors and rely on it being an open standard, Apple/Intel would never make such a thing open.
 
I know it's been royalty free for a while now, but it's still proprietary and only runs on Intel CPUs; I've read that Gigabyte wanted to add TB3 onto the X399 boards but Intel won't licence it and while AMD are a threat to Intel, they'll never licence it to work on AMD systems, just like Optane.

Besides, nothing to stop them from doing a U-Turn and start charging royalties again once they have a strangehold on the market.
 
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thunderbolt_(interface)#Royalty_situation
It is not yet royalty free^^
Technically Intel do intend to make it an open solution at some point, or at one point claimed they eventually intended to and may have changed their mind, and of course Wendell has hacked it to work on AMD boards so it could literally be a software update away from add-in board support on loads of Ryzen systems out there, but yeah for the time being it's still closed hardware with only a few limited & expensive chipsets supporting it which has done it few favours.
 
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