this post was submitted on 09 Sep 2024
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I think that maybe having two similar lightning bolt symbols that mean different things wasn't the best design decision that the USB guys could have made.
The 'Thunderbolt' symbol is Intel's proprietary technology. Apple and Intel made it. First apple registered Thunderbolt as a trademark but later they transferred it to Intel. The lightning bolt icon which supports fast charging phones or other devices when connected to the laptop is different and developed by the USB guys.
Things are muddied a bit though because USB 4 has built in support for thunderbolt
Everything defined in the Thunderbolt 3 spec was incorporated into the USB 4 spec, so Thunderbolt 3 and USB 4 should be basically identical. In reality the two standards are enforced by different certification bodies, so some hardware manufacturers can't really market their compliance with one or the other standard until they get that certification. Framework's laptops dealt with that for a while, where they represented that their ports supported certain specs that were basically identical to the USB 4 spec or even the Thunderbolt 4 spec, but couldn't say so until after units had already been shipping.
One should note that though Thunderbolt over USB-C offers the same speed and connectivity as a native thunderbolt cable, the native cable can be 40m long whereas the USB-C implementation is max 2m