macOS Sierra beta points to future Macs equipped with 10Gbps USB 3.1 Gen 2
Upcoming Macs may support USB 3.1 Gen 2, enabling peripheral speeds up to a maximum 10 gigabits per second, code discovered in macOS Sierra suggests.
A string in the Sierra beta mentions SuperSpeed+, a term reserved for Gen 2 ports, 9to5Mac noted on Wednesday. In fact it also specifically cites the 10-gigabit speed cap, twice as fast as Gen 1.
Apple could be planning to include Gen 2 on updated iMacs and MacBook Pros, which should be announced sometime this fall. Support would likely come through Thunderbolt 3, which is not only cross-compatible with Gen 2 but offers native speeds up to 40 gigabits per second, and DisplayPort 1.2 connectivity.
Most people probably won't see an appreciable difference from Thunderbolt 3 or Gen 2, at first, but the technologies could simplify connecting devices like 4K monitors, and speed up backups and file transfers on some external drives.
While there have been few rumors about what upgrades Apple has in store for the iMac, the MacBook Pro is expected to be thinner, and sport an OLED strip showing context-sensitive commands. Higher-end models should come equipped with AMD's Polaris graphics chips.
A string in the Sierra beta mentions SuperSpeed+, a term reserved for Gen 2 ports, 9to5Mac noted on Wednesday. In fact it also specifically cites the 10-gigabit speed cap, twice as fast as Gen 1.
Apple could be planning to include Gen 2 on updated iMacs and MacBook Pros, which should be announced sometime this fall. Support would likely come through Thunderbolt 3, which is not only cross-compatible with Gen 2 but offers native speeds up to 40 gigabits per second, and DisplayPort 1.2 connectivity.
Most people probably won't see an appreciable difference from Thunderbolt 3 or Gen 2, at first, but the technologies could simplify connecting devices like 4K monitors, and speed up backups and file transfers on some external drives.
While there have been few rumors about what upgrades Apple has in store for the iMac, the MacBook Pro is expected to be thinner, and sport an OLED strip showing context-sensitive commands. Higher-end models should come equipped with AMD's Polaris graphics chips.
Comments
http://www.usb.org/developers/ssusb/USB_3_1_Language_Product_and_Packaging_Guidelines_FINAL.pdf
Tooth 5.0
JFYI You can also make your own RAID 0 arrays easily enough for a fraction of the price. Having been in the Apple business since the late 70's I have seen so many ready made disk units fail I have become very shy of them now it's my own money. I use inexpensive and easily replaceable external dual docks both USB3 and TB and add bare drives and stripe them in my case using SoftRAID. Currently I find the 3TB 7200 Seagate Barracudas work very well and I always have a daily clones made using Carbon Copy Cloner to a second and third set of identical 6TB RAIDs (all automatically from CCC scripts). This gives me a kind of manual RAID 0 + 1. I use TB as primary and USB3 dual docks as the clone targets. The USB3 dual docks run $30 on Amazon. They are as fast as a TB1 but don't have the bidirectional speed of TB. I mention this as unless you are using FCPro then USB3 maybe sufficient. The TB docks from Highpoint run around $200. Of course the 3TB bare disks these days are very inexpensive. I tried using a pair of SSDs but it wasn't price / performance good enough for me ... by a long way yet!
Remember for many people thy are fine. My wife would be fine. On the other hand, like you, could not tolerate the lack of performance, in fact I want the best pair of GPUs I can afford in a Mac as I run macOS with GPU dependent Apple Pro apps and Windows 10 where I take advantage of paired GPUs when applicable.