The new USB4 protocol could be a single port to rule them all, but it probably won’t make life any easier for shoppers poring over specs.
If your new laptop or desktop PC features a Thunderbolt 3 port, congratulations! This do-it-all connector can link virtually any peripheral—even ones that are daisy-chained together—at astonishing speeds of up to 40Gbps, all while delivering enough power to charge batteries, too.
But Thunderbolt 3 is a proprietary spec that belongs to Intel, which until recently limited PC makers’ ability to include it in their products without paying royalties. So your new laptop or desktop PC might not feature a Thunderbolt 3 port after all, unless it’s a premium model. All Mac laptops have them, and Intel says about 400 PC models have them, but that still leaves many PCs out, especially cheaper ones.
The good news is that Intel has long promised that it will eventually make Thunderbolt 3 royalty-free, and on Monday we finally got a glimpse of how that will happen: Thunderbolt 3 is merging with USB.
Specifically, it will be baked into a brand new version of USB, called USB4. It’s a welcome development, though it adds yet another spec name to an already-crowded field of USB specs that laptop and desktop shoppers must consider.
USB4, scheduled for release this year, will include the best parts of both Thunderbolt 3 and USB-C. That means 40Gbps data transfers for external storage drives, eight times the speed of the USB 3.
