Only in your straw-man world where adding those ports means taking away TB3/USB ports
(a) the whole discussion is a sketchy rumour, about "adding ports", with zero mention of "retaining" the current port configuration.
(b) multiple people in the various threads about this topic, have said, that they
want to "swap" some USB-C ports, for USB-A ports.
you can predict how many displays the new SoCs in future MBPs will support based solely on the M1/Intel UHD Mac Minis
Literally never said anything about
how many displays it will support. What I said, is that the Mini's for the last 2 1/2 years, including the one with M1,
dedicate one of their graphics outputs to HDMI, making it unusable for non-HDMI displays.
Device #1 into the TB3 port. Device #2 daisy-chains onto Device #1's second TB3 port.
How many TB3 SSDs do
you know of that support daisy chaining? And, I'd like to think you're knowledgable enough to realise that this is defeating the purpose of using TB3 - a good SSD can saturate TB3 on it's own.
If neither of your devices has two TB3 ports, M1 Macs now support the new multi-port Thunderbolt 4 hubs.
Yeah I found one, and discussed it. It needs AC power, and weighs nearly a kilogram. And still, sharing bandwidth. Kind of defeats the purpose of "high speed I/O" if you're just gonna use a hub.
That's because nobody is asking for that.
Please try reading the threads then, because people
are saying they want USB-A
in place of USB-C.
Yes it’s hypocritical for you to tell others to just use a hub if it’s clearly a bother for you to do so.
One hub costs $29, is bus powered and weighs ~70 grams.
The other costs $150, needs A/C power and weights 750 grams with the AC adapter.
You could by four of those USB-C hubs, to have all the HDMI and card readers and USB-A ports you want, hanging off four independent ports (and thus not crippling their speed) for less than it would cost to buy that one USB4 hub, which would then have to share the upstream bandwidth for speed.