Thunderbolt 5 vs. Thunderbolt 4: Everything you need to know

The issue is more likely to be availability, and marketability.

In general the demand for high refresh rates on desktop displays is driven by gamers, far more so than resolution - it's pointless having a 5K or 6K display if your GPU can only render the game in a playable fashion at 1440P or whatever. This demographic is well known to sacrifice resolution for higher refresh rates. I guess a low detail image that animates smoothly is preferable to a high detail image that is jerky or looks like a slide show.

A large part of the buying market for high resolution displays (particularly above 4K in the 27-36" range) is going to non-gaming users, who are doing regular desktop work where 60Hz is likely to be fine. Most people aren't going to be able to type or draw or do much else productive fast enough to "defeat" 60Hz for practical uses.

I don't think it's a coincidence that Dell, ASUS, Samsung, LG and BenQ all have high-end displays shipping or announced, that explicitly mention support for macOS, and just happen to use a PPI that suits macOS' scaling "@2x" scaling mode perfectly.

Nor do I think it's a coincidence that the 5K@60Hz spec they mostly support is viable on Macs as old as the 2016 MBP15, from 8 years ago. Heck even a 2018 Mac mini with just an iGPU will do 5K@60Hz.

I'm not saying no manufacturers will support higher refresh rates, but realistically I think you're looking at a product that would be a niche within a niche. It's only recently that most of the above manufacturers have (re)entered the ~200PPI display market, it's going to take a while before there's enough potential customers for what you're talking about.

They were, as far as I know, the first company to sell 27" monitors over Thunderbolt back in 2011.

So Apple has been all in on Thunderbolt for years, they just persisted with the Lightning connector on iPhones.

Phones mostly don't really make use of Thunderbolt bandwidth like laptops. They make use of the common charging standard of the USB-C connector.

I've never been a fan of the Lightning connector but given they've been making use of Thunderbolt on laptops before most vendors considered it, saying the market has moved on without them is silly.

The market moved to catch up with Apple.

I mean thunderbolt 1 spec was released in 2013. Thunderbolt 5 is the 5th revision in 11 years. Thunderbolt 4 spec was published in 2020, you cannot possibly think about all future needs/usages but couldn't we have anticipated in 2020 that 5k and 8k screen would be a thing and that people would want more bandwidth than 40gbps?

All these standard changes every 2.5 years just create a compatibility mess and confusion for the consumers who don't understand why monitor A doesn't work well with computer B with cable C.

Couldn't we have jumped from thunderbolt 1 to 3 to 5 capabilities directly? Would our life have been more miserable had we had to wait a little bit more from an upgrade from say thunderbolt 3 but if it meant that thunderbolt 4 had been released in late 2021 or 2022 with capabilities of current thunderbolt 5 already? Like trading latency for higher improvements over generation? Does that even make sense or where there limiting factors that prevented thunderbolt 5 capable equipment to be built in 2022 already?