linkman

Mcnaugha2 said:

Anything they do with any radio frequency must be publicly declared. 5Ghz is primarily reserved for Wi-Fi. I’d need to research to discover if any other protocols are approved to use it. 

I thought the 2.4 and 5 GHz bands are largely unlicensed industrial, scientific, and medical bands and don't require regulatory approval. Wi-Fi must compete with other devices in those frequencies and tolerate the interference from other things.

One thing I highly recommend is avoiding 8 GB of RAM unless you intend to use if for less than 3 years. While macOS does a lot better than the latest versions of Windows with low amounts of RAM (a mere 8 GB at my work is quite painful to use now without launching any apps), do not underestimate the ability of application programmers to be lazy and inefficient and consume far more memory than they need to.

100W USB-C output. It's nice to see manufacturers starting to provide this port with enough power delivery to reasonably operate larger laptops such as the 16" MBP instead of having to rely on the AC inverter with another conversion back to DC incurring an energy loss. Note that the competition is also including USB-C ports also.

Not withstanding potential security concerns and cost savings, is there any advantage this device would have versus a camera that potentially has a lot more functionality?

While we see published speeds for this device making it look good, real world speeds for small USB flash drives often don't come anywhere close to that. Try and write 200 GB to it -- you'll see thermal throttling take the speed way down from the peak advertised speed. Until vendors can significantly cut down on the heat being generated by the circuitry larger form factors are going to be much faster for heavy activity. You'll sacrifice speed for portability. The small form factors are good for low read/write activity or if you are fine with large file transfers taking a long time.