Many phones indeed only support USB 2.0. For example the base iPhone 17. The Pro does support USB 3.2, however.

> I guess everybody has given up on the idea of saving their photos and videos over USB?

Correct.

My last two phones in the last 4 years had at least USB 3.1

Do you import originals or do you have the "most compatible" setting turned on?

I always assumed apple simply hated people that use windows/linux desktops so the occasional broken file was caused by the driver being sort-of working and if people complain, well, they can fuck off and pay for icloud or a mac. After upgrading to 15 pro which has 10 gbps usb-c it still took forever to import photos and the occasional broken photos kept happening, and after some research it turns out that the speed was limited by the phone converting the .heic originals into .jpg when transferring to a desktop. Not only does it limit the speed, it also degrades the quality of the photos and deletes a bunch of metadata.

After changing the setting to export original files the transfer is much faster and I haven’t had a single broken file / video. The files are also higher quality and lower filesize, although .heic is fairly computationally-demanding.

Idk about Android but I suspect it might have a similar behavior

With TB5, and deep pockets, you might probably also benchmark it against a setup with dedicated TB5 enclosures (e.g., Mercury Helios 5S).

TB5 has PCIe 4.0 x4 instead of PCIe 3.0 x4 -- that should give you 50 GbE half-duplex instead of 25 GbE. You would need a different network card though (ConnectX-5, for example).

Pragmatically though, you could also aggregate (bond) multiple 25 GbE network card ports (with Mac Studio, you have up to 6 Thunderbolt buses, so more than enough to saturate a 100GbE connection).