Apple has finally released its own Thunderbolt 5 cable, promising creative professionals serious performance gains over Thunderbolt -- with the right peripherals.
Image Credit: Apple
On Tuesday, Apple announced the release of the new M4 Mac mini, the second of three announcements it planned on making during the week. And, just as it did on Monday with the new iMac, the company quietly released a new accessory to go along with it.
Apple now is offering its own Thunderbolt 5 cable, available from Apple's online store for $69.00. The 1-meter long, black braided cable can be used for up to 240 watts of power delivery, as well as significant data transfer speeds over its predecessors.
The M4 Pro Mac mini is the first Mac that can take advantage of the new standard, as it features three Thunderbolt 5 ports on the rear.
Thunderbolt 5 was officially launched in September 2023 and promised to be a massive improvement for creative professionals and people with sizable bandwidth requirements. Thunderbolt 5 on the M4 Pro Mac mini offers up to 80 gigabits per second of bi-directional bandwidth by adopting PCI-E 4 addressing versus PCI-E 3 on Thunderbolt 4. By comparison, Thunderbolt 4 manages 40Gbps.
It also doubles the PCI Express data throughput, enabling both faster storage connectivity and improving the bandwidth available for external graphics systems.
Thunderbolt 4 is capable of running two 4K monitors at 60Hz. In comparison, Thunderbolt 5 can manage multiple 8K displays, or up to 540Hz displays, or three 4K displays running at 144Hz.
Thunderbolt 5 is backward compatible with both Thunderbolt 3 and Thunderbolt 4, though speeds will be reduced to 40Gb/s.