Additionally, USB 4 will also be optimized for Thunderbolt 4, which was announced at the beginning of this year. Devices with USB 4 are expected to arrive by next year.
The new USB 4 standard will offer 40 Gbps maximum speed similar as well as compatible with Thunderbolt 3, DisplayPort Alt Mode 2.0, and better resource allocation for video. The latest standard is called USB 4 which was announced last year by the USB Promoter Group. The first set of devices featuring USB 3.0 came out in January 2010. The new standard also focused on decreasing power consumption, increasing power output, and provided backward compatibility with USB 2.0. We then saw USB 3.0 publish on 12 November 2008 to further increase data transfer speeds to up to 5 Gbps, which was also called SuperSpeed. Hewlett-Packard, Intel, Lucent Technologies (Nokia), NEC, and Philips pushed for higher data transfer rates, where the new standard brought speeds of up 480 Mbps. In April 2000, the USB 2.0 specification was announced after getting consent from the USB Implementers Forum (USB-IF). A variety of manufacturers followed Apple and started producing legacy-free PCs with USB ports. USB 1.1 was actually the first widely used specification as it made its first appearance on the Apple iMac in September 1998. The decision to add two-speed configurations was taken so that it could support both high-speed devices like printers and disk drives as well as low-cost peripherals like keyboards and mice. The first specification called USB 1.0 made its debut in January 1996 offering data transfer speeds of 1.5 Mbps (Low Speed) and 12 Mbps (Full Speed).