Thunderbolt 4 is the latest generation of Intel’s Thunderbolt technology, and though it doesn’t revolutionize the standard, it does shore it up in ways that make it far more of a high-performance guarantee than competing standards like USB4. However, the tech may not be all about raising the minimums. Intel has demonstrated Thunderbolt as being capable of far greater performance; it just hasn’t implemented it yet.
Here’s what you need to know about Thunderbolt 4 to make the most of this high-speed and high-performance connection standard.
Intel officially announced Thunderbolt 4 at CES 2020, with the first supporting chips, Intel’s own Tiger Lake mobile CPUs, launching at the end of that year. Thunderbolt 4 saw much wider availability in 2021 with the launch of third-party Thunderbolt 4 cables, and today Thunderbolt 4 ports can be found in all the latest generations of laptops, including Apple’s MacBook Pros.
Thunderbolt 4 cables are available from a range of brands and are comparably priced to Thunderbolt 3 and USB4 cables.
As far as speed goes, Thunderbolt 4 is not explicitly faster than Thunderbolt 3. Both generations of Thunderbolt can have a maximum capable throughput of 40 Gbps. However, where Thunderbolt 3 has a minimum guaranteed data rate of just 10 Gbps, Thunderbolt 4 has a minimum data requirement of 32Gbps, with an additional 10 Gbps available for PCIExpress video transmission using DisplayPort alt mode.
This means that while there are Thunderbolt 3 cables that can offer the same performance as Thunderbolt 4, most won’t. If you want a greater performance guarantee, Thunderbolt 4 is the way to go. That’s especially true when you consider that Intel has shown Thunderbolt cables transmitting at up to 80Gbps, though it’s not yet clear if that’s for a future Thunderbolt 4 cable, or an expected Thunderbolt 5 generation of the technology.
That extra PCIExpress bandwidth means that Thunderbolt 4 can also support multiple monitors in a daisy-chain configuration, making it a great solution for external monitors outputting from laptops.
Thunderbolt is a standard jam-packed with features, from enabling external graphics cards to providing Ethernet network access, many designed to continue differentiating Thunderbolt from the USB standard. We already mentioned the new 32Gbps SSD connection speed, but for a device to be certified for Thunderbolt 4, it must also include key features like:
Thunderbolt 4 is also backwards compatible with all other forms of USB-C. That includes USB-C 3.2 2×2, USB4, and Thunderbolt 3.
Thunderbolt 4 uses the USB-C connection type, just like Thunderbolt 3 and USB4. However, it is based on the Thunderbolt protocol, which offers greater performance and feature guarantees than USB4.
Thunderbolt 4 has a greater performance guarantee, with its minimum of 40 Gbps total bandwidth. In comparison, while USB4 can reach that sort of bandwidth, it is only mandated to support 10 Gbps. New standards for USB4 suggest it could reach 80 Gbps — in a similar manner to Intel’s 80 Gbps Thunderbolt demonstration.
Scroll through any app for five minutes, and you’ll find someone maxxing something. Their skin, their sleep, their protein intake, even their Friday night on the couch. That little suffix has been everywhere this year, and now it has a trophy to show for it. In a recent announcement, Dictionary.com named maxxing its 2026 Word of the Year.
What are people actually doing when they’re maxxing?
Speech-to-text apps have flooded the App Store, making it easier than ever to type on our Macs with just our voice. I have previously covered one such app called TypeWhisper. However, there has been a dearth of good text-to-speech models, and most of the good ones are locked behind a subscription.
Ollama, an open-source app that lets you run local AI models on your computer, wants to change that. It works on macOS, Windows, and Linux, and your prompts are never stored or used for training.
Did you think hitting delete on your AI chatbot conversation actually makes it disappear? Georgia Tech researchers just proved that's not entirely true. They have built a forensic tool called ORISA that can dig deleted conversations from your phone and even rebuild them into a working chatbot session you can keep talking to.
How can ORISA bring deleted AI conversations back?