Thunderbolt 5

One of the things we didn’t see coming with Apple’s M4 chips was an upgrade to the Thunderbolt 5 spec. That’s perhaps because the faster port is limited to the M4 Pro and M4 Max — chips that we hadn’t heard much about before Tuesday’s Mac mini unveiling — but it was something even the rumor mill didn’t get wind of.

Thunderbolt 5 pushes transfer rates to a staggering 120 GB/s, provided you’re connecting to a Thunderbolt 5 device and using a Thunderbolt 5 cable. Naturally, Apple is happy to sell you one of those, although the one-meter cable will set you back another $69, so you’ll want to make sure you really need it.

The good news is that Apple isn’t skimping on the Thunderbolt 5 ports. Every Mac with an M4 Pro or M4 Max chip gets three of them. The M4 models get an upgrade to Thunderbolt 4 from the earlier Thunderbolt / USB 4 ports on the M3 MacBook Pro and M3 iMac. That’s a minor upgrade in terms of performance, but it does improve external display support. Plus, all four ports on the four-port M4 iMac are Thunderbolt 4, unlike last year’s M3, which was a mixture of two USB4 ports and two USB3 ports.