Have you played with the newest bend insensitive fiber? You can wrap it around a pencil and an otdr shows no or minimal loss. But I think you’re correct about damage from average consumers. They’d destroy the ferrule in no time.
But fiber still isn’t a free lunch. The longest high speed cables already use fiber internally, but they’re expensive because they need extra optics and transceivers inside. Moving the extra fiber hardware into the laptop and client device would make the cables cheaper but make the hardware more expensive. That’s not a trade off that most people would take as most people don’t actually need long cable runs.
The above comment was trying to use Apple premium cables as the reference for being too expensive, but opening Amazon shows plenty of Thunderbolt 4 cables in the $20-$30 range from other vendors. It’s really hard to imagine a scenario where forcing every cable to be a combination of fiber and copper would make things cheaper for us consumers.
I've watched tons of modern fiber and cat6 be abused. My dog dug up and chewed some. 0.5db loss. The copper next to it was a complete loss
The fiber always wins.
As for pricing. Once you get to 10gbps+ its at best a wash.
Transceivers are 10-20 bucks. Cheap rj45 10gbps sfp+ are 2-3x that price. Produce a ton of heat as well. This will only get worse.
25gbps fiber transceivers are now almost as cheap as 10 gbps.
Meanwhie, higher speed copper standards are much more expensive and produce even more heat.
Higher speed fiber is dropping in price.
Higher speed copper is not because nothing drives it anymore.
How did you know how they test for these specs?