For the past year, if you wanted a Thunderbolt-capable system, you had exactly one choice — Apple. That’s finally beginning to change, with MSI’s Z77A-GD80 motherboard leading the charge to introduce PC users to the experience of paying $50 for a six foot cable. That price tag isn’t a misprint, and it’s not just due to Apple’s insane markup. Thunderbolt achieves its 40Gbps bandwidth (20Gbps bi-directional bandwidth per channel) and power capabilities by using an active cable design. There are a total of six chips at each end of a Thunderbolt cable including a pair of Gennum GC2033 microcontrollers.

Thus far, broader availability hasn’t resulted in lower cable prices; the Thunderbolt cable Elgato introduced recently is $59.95 for a two-foot length; significantly more expensive than Apple’s. Thunderbolt is often talked about as a breakthrough product that could drive a comprehensive dock from a single connection point — Apple’s Thunderbolt display is an excellent example of this idea in action — but there’s no way the standard will ever get off the ground without lower costs and a fundamentally different approach to how “docks” are sold.

Right now, docks are treated like luxury goods. Systems like Sony’s Vaio Z, which actually includes a dock that uses Thunderbolt (though not branded as such) starts at $1795, nearly 4x the average price of a consumer laptop. Asus’ Transformer Prime is a $599 tablet with a $149 dock add-on. According to Asus, the dock comes with a “full QWERTY keyboard” (as opposed to those pesky keyboards that leave off the “s” and “a” keys), offers “comprehensive connectivity” (hilariously defined as one USB port and a built-in SD card reader) and “prolonged battery life” with a 22Wh battery.

That’s right. $15 worth of battery, a $10 keyboard, one USB 2.0 port, and an SD reader are worth $149. Asus isn’t alone in this sort of ridiculous pricing: When Motorola launched the Atrix in early 2011, it won a great deal of interest by announcing a dock option — then promptly lost everyone’s interest when it declared that the dock would cost $499. Currently you can buy them for $99, an infinitely more reasonable price.

The problem here is that manufacturers price these options into the stratosphere and are apparently astonished when they don’t sell. Several of Intel’s key visions for ultrabooks include laptops that transform into tablets by detaching from keyboards, and Thunderbolt could serve a useful purpose in limiting the number of cables people need to carry, but not with its current cost structure. USB 3 and DisplayPort aren’t perfect, but they’re more than good enough given the price disparities.

That’s not to say Thunderbolt was wasted effort, even if it doesn’t go anywhere. The research that went into the design and its unique capabilities could well lead to future, simpler interfaces down the road or advances in optical communication (Thunderbolt did start out as the fiber-optic Light Peak, after all). Looking at the Thunderbolt ecosystem as it exists, it’s difficult to see much future. It’s not just cable cost — it’s the presence of USB 3, the fact that external graphics for mobile systems has never made much headway despite years of prototypes, the need for new displays to take full advantage of what Thunderbolt can do, and the fact that manufacturers treat docks like cash cows instead of mass market opportunities. Standards with bigger relative advantages have failed against lower odds; FireWire is a cautionary tale for how a dramatically superior standard can wither and die in the face of royalty payments that amounted to pennies on the dollar.

It’s doubtful Thunderbolt will achieve even FW400-levels of success. FireWire was adopted by the video industry because USB’s terminally slow signalling rate was utterly unsuited for even the modest demands of 2000-era equipment. USB 3 got rid of the CPU-dependent transfers and interrupts that made USB 2 problematic, and adds a theoretical peak bandwidth of 5Gbps, or 625MB/s. Even the fastest SSDs are incapable of saturating a link that fast. Thunderbolt is technologically impressive but practically problematic — without a major overhaul, it’s going nowhere.