Apple cost their customers dear with future compatibility with USB3 delivery, as they were 2.5 years late to put it on their computers,
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The USB Promoter Group announced the release of USB 3.0 in ‘November 2008’
, apple had from this moment the opportunity to begin the process of implementing it in its products, the first usb3 peripherals and products shipped in november 2009 and january 2010.
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But the first apple devices to have usb3, came out in June 2012 and the first imacs in october 2012!
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Effectively macs were late to the usb3 party, by 2 and half years by any measure, if not 4 years late from the promotor groups announcement.
USB3 may not be the worlds greatest standard, but it is very cost affective per port compared to apple thunderbolt, which apple pushed in advance of USB3, what do I use my thunderbolt ports for today you might ask ? As little more than fancy DVI outputs ! for two monitors, thunderbolt is overpriced and under-delivering in terms of utility or fruitfulness, except for a high end market that is not representative of many a general ordinary apple consumer, which apple seems to have forgotten.
Add still today in 2017 apple are offering only USB2 on nearly all of their iOS devices! apples lighting port has not been upgraded to USB 3 speeds except I believe for the pro line of ipads!
On USB2 imacs like my mid 2011 you are limited to a maximum of (480 MBps protocol speed) ie around 48 megabytes as second transfers speeds to an iphone via lightning, alternatively over wireless AC regardless of acclaimed headline maximums speeds like 1100 MBps per second from a two foot apart with direct air line of sight best case scenario between devices and router, most people might realistically get around 400Mbps from a wireless AC router, so really still just around 40 Megabytes a second via iTunes wifi syncing might be expected, where as the the storage internal to an iphone 6s plus 128gb can write at over 279 megabytes a second, transferring data from macs to ios devices(except the pro ipad) is therefore inordinately and antiquated-ly slow compared to most android phones.
I feel that much of this is deliberate in that apple don’t really want you transferring data at acceptable speeds between your computer and your iphone, they want you to use it as a media consumption device and to pay for and download everything on your devices from their – cashtill stores. Also their single chip storage designs means that although read speeds with nvme express maybe good on their phones since the 128gb models onwards upto say 1.8 gigabytes a second, until their chips are multi channel or more chips and address lanes are used – write speeds on 128gb models around 270 Megabytes a second- wont match read speeds pace. as single chips designs will always have limited performance unless bespoke designed internally.