i have never used thunderbolt before, because I knew it was a joke that you couldn't rely on. i have ignored all suggestions that i should solve this problem or that one with a thunderbolt peripheral because i knew it would be a waste of my time and literally any other solution would be more sustainable. i have been fully vindicated.
a friend hooked me up with a 10gb ethernet card in a TB2 enclosure, because computers are fucking garbage and nobody will make a native 10gb USB adapter - really, you can't buy this. all solutions involve a big stupid steel box that sits on your desk and has its own power supply. dumb. at least this wasn't $350 like the other ones - only $150, because thunderbolt shit will always be exotic and expensive.
it's a TB2 enclosure, but they included a TB2>TB3 adapter. worked on the machine they tested on. doesn't work on mine. come to find out this is because Intel removed TB1/2 support from TB4, so my board is simply incapable of using this. that is asinine and absurd, but in addition, they also retroactively removed TB1/2 support from any TB3 boards.
apparently, if you have a TB3 motherboard, then you get a BIOS update, it will delete the already-functioning, perfectly usable TB1/2 support. your devices, which work perfectly today, will stop working for no given reason. maybe it's in some whitepaper somewhere. i don't give a fuck. maybe it's a security thing. i don't give a fuck. hardware devices which work today will stop working and you will never be able to use them again. unforgivable.
i knew and expected this however, because USB (and TB is just USB with lipstick) is a toy. it has always been a toy. i remember it being a toy in 1999. USB is not considered "mission critical" by anyone, not by the USB forum, not by intel, not by board vendors, so it is allowed to just break and nobody cares.
you want to see mission critical? plug any PCIe card into any slot in any computer ever made, and no matter how new or old it is I fucking promise you it is going to show up in your OS. you can literally saw 3/4 of the connector off and plug in an x16 card and it'll link up at x1 and do it's best. I mean, it's ridiculous that no OS reports this as an error, that you have to go digging to find out that it's happened, but at least it was rare enough for many years that I can sort of understand that, and server/workstation BIOS' do recognize this as an error.
USB on the other hand is not considered "essential," so it works when it wants to, and stops when it wants to and won't tell you why. USB ports are labeled clearly only when the vendor feels like it, and few vendors ever feel like it. USB downgrades in speed when it wants to, and this wouldn't be a problem if the IF etc. were willing to acknowledge that 99% of USB cables are counterfeits, yes, even that brand, and require OS vendors to report a 3.2 device training at 2.0 or 3.0 speeds as an error instead of silently negotiating down to a speed that renders the device useless, without telling the user they're losing 80% of the performance they paid for.
notice that they actually did this when USB 2.0 first came out; windows, and I think macos, would report a 2.0 device negotiated at 1.1 speeds as an error. this quietly stopped, presumably when they realized that 3.x cables are just too precise to make on the cheap. counterfeit cables, which represent the vast majority of the market, will never work correctly, and if they continued to report suboptimal training as the hard, showstopping error that it is, it would cause unending panic. so, we just quietly sweep that under the rug.
as far as i know, no OS reports poor USB training, and no OS has a way to check what speed your USB devices are actually linked up at. oh sure, apple buries it in the hardware profiler, but 95% of users will never understand that. windows exposes it nowhere, and linux requires some obscure CLI tool. shh; you don't need to know if your devices are working correctly.
so yeah. USB is a joke, and thunderbolt is just more of the same shit. people say it works for them; great, have fun with that. what i've seen is over a decade of people describing spooky action at a distance: stuff mysteriously not working, working on one machine and not another, working one day and not another, appearing to work but not actually. people publishing handmade truth tables showing which docks will work on which laptops. lol. lmao.
i watched this going on and said "i am not fucking using that for anything I depend on" because it's just the same USB bullshit as always. christ, even my goddamn DAC randomly disconnects from my machine. it's been going on for a decade, across two different DACs and three different machines. USB is just a joke; no matter what you call it, you cannot depend on it.
"no no it's okay, TB4 is a reboot, we did it right this time" yeah, intel, until you change your fucking mind again. until you decide to bump it to TB4.1 and then have my motherboard vendor push an update that makes another thing I spent $200 on stop working, because you think you made a little poopsie whoopsie, and you don't consider it a problem to make an unknown quantity of devices stop working permanently. even if TB4 really "fixes it," i don't care. everything the USB-IF has done since USB 3 has been clown college bullshit and Thunderbolt has been a dumb gimmick for just as long. i will never trust either one.
do not correct me if i'm wrong. this is cohost, not enough people are watching for it to matter. i don't care if some forumite misinformed me. the fact this device doesn't work on my machine but does on another is the smoking gun, it's completely unforgivable, zero excuse, and the fact this explanation is even plausible is why I'm mad.
i mean, if this was an old pcie device, I'd be rolling my eyes at this forum post and continuing with troubleshooting, because I fucking know that intel would not just casually patch out PCIe 1.0 support, and asus wouldn't sell a motherboard that can't use PCIe 1.0 cards. it would be rightly seen as completely outrageous and they would both get jointly sued by google and microsoft and lose. but this is exactly what i expected; why would I question it.
