Just saying that I wouldn’t be surprised if they were reusing some boards or controllers with limited throughput that their manufacturing plants and fabs were already pumping out. Cook got famous for being an operational efficiency nerd that made sure Apple had very little spare parts and inventory on the books.
But yeah, iPhone physical IO speeds have been slow for a looong time. My guess is that so much of Apple’s install base is syncing over the cloud that it hasn’t been a priority.
The biggest applause at the in-person event was, no lie, for the larger cloud storage plans.