For many years, it looked like Thunderbolt was destined to be a modern version of FireWire: faster and smarter than contemporary USB interfaces, but so rare outside of Macs that there isn't a very wide range of accessories beyond adapters and external hard drives. Thunderbolt versions 1 and 2 are available in most Macs sold between 2011 and now, but it has been included in just a handful of PC laptops and high-end motherboards.

Thunderbolt 3 is turning that around. The port is suddenly beginning to show up in high-end offerings from just about every major PC OEM, starting with some Lenovo workstation laptops and Dell’s new XPS lineup and continuing in laptops and convertibles from HP, Acer, Intel, and others.

We've been talking to the PC companies at CES about this sudden turnaround, and their answers have all been in more or less the same vein. The increased speed of Thunderbolt 3 combined with all the benefits of USB Type-C (including driving displays via Alternate Mode and charging laptops via Power Delivery) has finally made Thunderbolt convenient enough to be worth the trouble.

“It’s a combination of the USB Type-C interface that can provide a lot of flexibility and then the throughput that it provides,” Kevin Sather, director of systems marketing at Razer, told Ars. “It’s just such an adaptable port… it’s backwards-compatible with Thunderbolt and Thunderbolt 2, it can do DisplayPort output with two 4K displays simultaneously, as well as passing data through. I think all the cards kind of lined up finally to make it a viable solution that consumers are going to like.”

In other words, it might be a little irritating for users of the current Thunderbolt port to buy new cables or adapters, but it seems like Intel’s decision to tie Thunderbolt to the ascendant and popular USB Type-C port is paying off nicely.

Whatever the reasoning behind PC makers’ sudden affection for the port, the upshot is that we should start seeing more Thunderbolt 3 accessories, too. More competition may drive down costs for external hard drives and the areas where Thunderbolt is already commonly used, but it’s more exciting to see companies develop new accessories that make proper use of all that bandwidth.

Exhibit A is the Razer Core, which serves both as a laptop dock and an external enclosure for dual-slot GPUs from Nvidia and AMD. A single Thunderbolt cable carries display data, USB and Ethernet data, and power from the dock to the laptop, a simple design that shows off the promise of both Thunderbolt 3 and USB Type-C. Razer is selling the Core alongside its new Blade Stealth Ultrabook and is aiming it primarily at gamers, but the company says it could work with other Thunderbolt 3-equipped PCs that decide to support it, and it should be just as easy to plug a pro-grade Fire or Quadro GPU into it if you want to run professional 3D applications.

Intel has also said that its upcoming high-end quad-core NUC will be compatible with external graphics docks. These could be third-party enclosures like the Core, or Intel could be working on its own external GPU case. In any case, look for this particular product category to take off in the next year or so.

More traditional Thunderbolt docks, those that simply turn a single Thunderbolt port into an array of USB, Ethernet, and display ports, should also become increasingly popular. Docks like this are by no means new, but using Thunderbolt instead of USB or a proprietary connector provides more bandwidth and means broader compatibility. Using a similar sort of dock over USB could create bottlenecks if you were using multiple ports at once, but Thunderbolt provides enough bandwidth that using a dock is more or less comparable to using built-in ports.

And on Apple's side of the fence, a new lineup of MacBooks and MacBook Pros with Thunderbolt 3 and a new version of the Thunderbolt Display could be a potent combination. The current display provides more USB ports and an Ethernet jack to Mac laptops, but the laptop still requires a separate power connection. A new version with Thunderbolt 3 and USB Type-C could drive the display, provide those extra ports, and power the laptop with just one cable.

This kind of thing is the next step in making thin-and-light laptops like the Blade Stealth or, say, Apple’s one-ported MacBook more palatable for more people, especially high-end users. It’s something convertible PCs have been stabbing at for years—portability when you want it, performance and extra connectivity when you need it.

A year ago I’d have told you that Thunderbolt wasn’t really going anywhere as a technology—USB, DisplayPort, and other standards would continue to be good enough to keep Thunderbolt from spreading very far, especially as they all slowly converged into the single port. Intel's decision to ride the USB Type-C wave seems to be reversing Thunderbolt's fortunes.

Back in August of 2014, the new Thunderbolt 3 port looked like a shorter version of the old one, and sticking with that port almost certainly would have doomed the interface to continued obscurity. It's still got a long way to go before it's as ubiquitous as USB, but now that it's tied to a port that the entire industry is moving toward anyway, it should become much more common than it was before. When Intel finally starts building Thunderbolt into its chipsets rather than requiring an additional controller chip, that should seal the deal and make Thunderbolt a mainstream port.

Listing image by Valentina Palladino