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Their proprietary SATA was just SATA with a wrong connector. It was not faster. Firewire was faster at the expense of massive security holes. A practical reason for having Thunderbolt connected to PCIe never materialized. Don't kid yourself - Apple made these calls for one reason and one reason only.

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There are external GPUs now that use thunderbolt, prior to this you could run external displays at a greater resolution than was available via HDMI at the time.

Firewire was mostly not used because people were content to endure USB, and USB had a larger availability on consumer hardware. Apple gained nothing by spending money to add the port to their computers so I find it hard to buy that they had a secret malevolent purpose in doing so. In this case they rolled the dice on a superior solution and it didn’t pay off.

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