The biggest problem with all this is that it's very nearly impossible to tell what kind of cable you have most of the time. If you're lucky (or purchased wisely), the cable will have it's type and class printed on it, but most don't -- certainly not OEM cables that ship with devices. And by now, most of us probably have a dozen or more USB-C cables of various sorts. Some of these may be TB cables. Some may even be TB4 cables. Some may even be data-only cables. But it's hard to keep track, and it's stupidly expensive to just replace everything every time a new standard is available [on one specific device].

He says that he used a Kensington Thunderbolt 5 cable, so I think that just reinforces the story that the vendors don't have things implemented properly yet.

That teardown (and the similar Lumafield scan) is quite misleading, though. Nothing about that is Apple-specific, or makes the cable in any way "better".

A signal will degrade as it travels through a cable. The longer the cable, the more it degrades. At USB4/TB4/TB5 speeds you can make a cable up to about 80cm before it starts to become a problem. Any cable longer than ~80cm needs active electronics to boost the signal's quality.

Apple's cable is 180cm, so it has those electronics. Any 180cm long USB4 cable made by any manufacturer is going to have them.

Yeah, it really seems like the author doesn't really understand the technology. Which is fine for an average user, but you'd expect better from a professional tech reviewer.

First, the power thing. He brings 240W charging as a "benefit of TB5". It isn't, it's a basic USB PD thing. Any USB-C device could use it - and of course it's only going to work if all the components actually support 240W charging. What does he mean that he "later discovered" his laptop was charging from one port, and at 87W, did he not read the specifications or the manual beforehand? It was never going to support more than 100W (the laptop's limit, dock can do 140W), so considering the laptop's own power brick delivers 330W it is guaranteed to be running in some power-saving mode.

The display issue could just as well be caused by the GPU only supporting DisplayPort 1.4, so the link to the GPU-USB4 controller is limited to an effective data rate of 26Gbps. A single uncompressed 4K 144Hz stream takes 31.35Gbps, even with a 3x DSC compression ratio that's not going to work! This is a well-known limitation of the RTX 4000 series, and people have been complaining about a lack of DP 2.0 for years. The part about a cable being "rated for 1440p165, not 4K" is nonsense: the only thing that matters is bandwidth, 4k60 requires 12.54Gbps, 1440p165 requires 16.30Gbps, and both match what you'd expect from a cable designed for DisplayPort 1.2's HBR2 (17.28Gbps).

Same story with the SSD performance. Giving a benchmark result is useless without actually explaining what you are benchmarking, and "folder copy time" is entirely meaningless. He gives a number of 252.3 MB/s for the benchmark - but the SSD is capable of 6000MB/s! Sure, the SSD's spec is for best-case sequential access, but if you want to test TB5 that's what you should be going for. 252.3 MB/s sounds more like random read/write, which is far less relevant here. And the stuff about "streaming a video via the internet": how about you tell us whether you were outputting video via the dock in either case? You know, the part which actually matters?

"Windows 11 reports the controller as USB4 v2": yes, because that's what it is. TB4 and TB5 are nothing more than USB4 with some optional parts made mandatory.

Look, I completely agree that the USB / Thunderbolt ecosystem has gotten quite complicated for the average user and has developed way too many gotcha's. But if you're a tech journalist you're supposed to know this! Don't tell us that your monitors mysteriously didn't work, do some basic research and tell us that they don't work because Nvidia screwed up. Don't tell us that it mysteriously didn't charge at maximum speed, tell us that it doesn't do so because the laptop manufacturer screwed up, and you got a dock which couldn't supply more than 140W anyways. Why bother writing an article if you're not going to provide any more value than some random Reddit rant?

The Apple Thunderbolt 5 cable is $69

My Lenovo P1 Gen 5 needs to reboot once after booting from power off, otherwise the Thunderbolt dock won't connect and I only have display, and no network or USB. Super annoying. I bought a docker station to save time.

I've been happy with a TB4 OWC dock. Zero issues in almost two years. I'm not using an Apple cable to connect my MBP to the dock.

That sounds bad, have any more details on what happened? You plugged in something external and ‘fried’ your ssd ?

I don’t know how likely that is here, but there was a class of attacks called Thunderspy which could allow an external malicious device full access to your computer via thunderbolt.

https://thunderspy.io/