New 10 GbE USB adapters are cooler, smaller, cheaper
For years, the best way to get 10 gigabit networking on laptops was to buy an expensive, large, and hot 10 GbE Thunderbolt adapter. With new RTL8159-based 10G USB 3.2 adapters coming onto the market, the bulky adapters might be a thing of the past. Just look at the size of the thing in comparison to my Thunderbolt adapters:
2.5G and even 5G USB…
USB cables are confusingly named and lack feature consistency across cords that look identical to the untrained eye. While the releases of the USB4 standard and the USB Type-C port were intended to address this decades-long problem once and for all, that didn't happen. USB4 quickly suffered from the same problems as the USB generations that preceded it — convoluted naming schemes, inconsistent fe…
USB and Thunderbolt are now intertwined, but that doesn't always make things easier. Thunderbolt 4 and Thunderbolt 5 are backwards-compatible with other specifications, like USB4, Thunderbolt 3, and even older USB versions. This leads to the common misconception that USB4 is the same as Thunderbolt. In reality, USB4 only has the potential to match Thunderbolt 5 in a few areas — but only Thunderbo…
