This exactly, reviewers are so obsessed with Camera and Benchmarks, they often miss these things.
What are you transferring to? Ultimately the pipeline is as slow as the slowest link - I use a Samsung SSD T5 which I just checked and is 540Mbps I think so is no faster than a USB-C 2. Equally, I fear that the cable that Apple supply may also be USB-C 2. Perhaps time for the flow on upgrade costs to kick in and upgrade to the Samsung SSd T7 for me 😉
Of course...
Transferring to PCIe 4.0 SSD connected over Thunderbolt 3. Have my iOS backups set to go to external SSD to save internal drive space. Just installing the "Day 1" iOS 26 patch on my iPhone 17 Pro Max now, it wasn't required to set up like MacRumors article claimed.
Will be interesting to see how much you can optimise it and the performance you achieve. While a PCIe 4.0 SSD should achieve 4-7Gbps I've often found the weak point is some component hidden in between which is impossible to identify. Keep us posted👍
The Samsung T5 is an interesting callback. Back when I got my first M1 MacBook, the T5 took a big hit in speed. Turns out it supports 10Gb/s on an Intel Mac but only 5Gb/s on an Apple Silicon Mac. Also, the cable Samsung supplied with that drive works for 10Gb/s on an iPad or 5Gb/s for the T5 but only 480Mbps on a USB-C iPhone. It's very perplexing.
I had forgotten what the specs were for the T5 and when I checked Samsung state it has a USB 3.1 Gen 2 interface but then state a transfer speed of 540Mb/s. It's sadly often the case that the bundled cable is a weak link, although when you're buying a card reader or SSD you'd expect it to be capable of the max speeds. I have a sneaky suspicion that the USB-C in the iPhone 17 Pro box is probably USB-C USB2 rather then 3.
You can notice when transferring large files, something like video.
