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by obenn 973 days ago
One example would be anybody who deals with lots of data transfer, like video editing. Accelerating that with a better cable can really add up.
1 comments

The cable can't accelerate data transfers. Either it works, or it doesn't¹. If it works, it works at full speed.

The bit specific to this Apple cable is that it does TB4 at 3m. That's not possible without active electronics to regenerate the signal in the cable; the maximum length for a passive cable is 2m. Passive 2m cables can be had for about $30 (noname) to $70 (non-Apple quality brand).

Fun fact: if you integrate optical transceivers, the cable can essentially be arbitrary length. (Though at some point you run into problems due to neither hardware nor software being built to work with the built-up latency.)

[¹ - for the sake of completeness, yes, these cables can partially fail with either sporadic bit errors or breaking one of the lanes. Both of these failure modes are extremely rare.]