Thunderbolt 5

Let's get up to speed with Apple's next-gen connectivity standard

- DAVID CROOKES

SOME OF OUR readers will be lucky enough to have one of those swanky new Macs with Thunderbolt 5, while some may still be wondering what all the fuss is about. After all, it's just a hardware interface that lets you connect devices to your computer, isn't it? Well, yes, but it also happens to be a technology that offers lightning-fast transfer speeds to give it the power to be utterly transformative.

Developed in a collaboration between Intel and Apple, Thunderbolt 5 is built on industry standards including USB4 2.0, PCIe 4.0 and DisplayPort 2.1. The interface, announced in September 2023, promises significant improvements in connectivity speed and bandwidth while still being broadly compatible with previous versions of Thunderbolt and USB.

Thunderbolt 5 is present in the new Mac mini with M4 Pro and the MacBook Pro with M4 Pro and M4 Max, and the key takeaway is that it's blisteringly fast. Thunderbolt 4, introduced in Apple computers from as recently as 2021, has been able to concurrently transmit and receive data between devices at 40 gigabits per second (Gbps), far in excess of the most popular USB specification: the USB 3.2 Gen 1 protocol, which has a maximum data flow speed of 5Gbps.

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