For phone users who only want to charge their phones, it's fine. It's hard to go too wrong.
For people who want to have e.g. 100W+ of power while feeding a signal to 4K60+ external monitors it's kind of a nightmare unless they know that "just use Thunderbolt 4" "trick".
While a bit of a tangent, I also love how Apple likes to make this EVEN MORE confusing by not supporting displayport MST in MacOS, causing most thunderbolt 4 docks on the market to be incapable of supporting multiple monitors when using MacOS.
So if you have say a 16" MacBook Pro, you need to get not only Thunderbolt 4 which is a rare spec, you want to ideally get ~85-140w PD not ~60w, AND you need to get an expensive dock that can split up the two HBR3 displayport channels instead of a regular MST Thunderbolt 4 dock.
Thankfully Apple has a solution to consumer confusion caused by all this. Buy a $1600 Apple studio display, connect it directly to your Mac, use the monitor itself as a dock, and everything will be compatible. Stay in the safe walled garden.
It is true that Apple makes thunderbolt support more difficult. A 6 years old XPS 13 supports 3 monitors with TB3 while you meed an M1 Max to support that configuration.
Surprised Apple didn’t go with thunderbolt. I wonder if they are worried about Intel’s licensing or something. It seems more apple-like to go with the higher performance, more straightforward standard.
USB-C is a mess. Whoever decided to fix the annoying compatibility issues of USB mini/micro/blah blah by just solving the physical port problem should never be consulted on anything again.
I mean... do you really need thunderbolt for a phone? Are you powering multiple 8k displays and daisey chaining a hub connected to an external raid storage array?
I get that it would be cool. For the ipad i think it makes sense to do that, but your phone...? Let's get real. Fast charging over a standardized cable with 10gbs transfer speeds is gonna be just fine.
If you shoot videos longer than a few seconds on your iPhone, you will appreciate a way to get them off of your phone at a non-glacial pace.
For professionals shooting significant amounts of video, this is more than a convenience feature. Once your device's internal storage fills up with video, which does not take long at 4K60, now your "camera" is a paperweight until you can dump that footage.
Obviously, only a very small percentage of people are using their phones this way. But I think Apple really values that market.
the pro 14s and 15s are plenty fast and could be used as work horses for a lot (most office work I'd wager) with a KBM and an external display. the only issue is it'd be kinda hard to take calls without a headset, but that's a good reason to take your old iphone out of the drawer, right? ;)
For people who want to have e.g. 100W+ of power while feeding a signal to 4K60+ external monitors it's kind of a nightmare unless they know that "just use Thunderbolt 4" "trick".