Everyone else is talking about bend radius but as someone who has abused fiber (just your standard cheap 10Gtek patch cables from Amazon) that's not the problem, modern fiber is quite bend-resistant.
The problem is the ends. Inside each fiber plug is an exposed fiber. Dust is a huge problem if you expect users to toss the cables in their bag, and worse is damage to the exposed ends of the fiber which can get chipped and then then in turn damage the exposed fiber in the device you're plugging into.
It would be cool if instead of those active Corning cables you could just get an active Thunderbolt-to-SMF plug, and then bring your own cables. Then the expensive part (the conversion circuitry and optical transceiver) can be reused for different applications and you just replace the cheap fiber with whatever length you want (or use pre-existing fiber in your home and update the optical transceivers when a new standard comes out and not have to re-wire)
edit: thinking about it more, it would have been a lot cooler if instead of thunderbolt we just got a better Ethernet. Then we could use any medium we wanted to.
The problem is the ends. Inside each fiber plug is an exposed fiber. Dust is a huge problem if you expect users to toss the cables in their bag, and worse is damage to the exposed ends of the fiber which can get chipped and then then in turn damage the exposed fiber in the device you're plugging into.
It would be cool if instead of those active Corning cables you could just get an active Thunderbolt-to-SMF plug, and then bring your own cables. Then the expensive part (the conversion circuitry and optical transceiver) can be reused for different applications and you just replace the cheap fiber with whatever length you want (or use pre-existing fiber in your home and update the optical transceivers when a new standard comes out and not have to re-wire)
edit: thinking about it more, it would have been a lot cooler if instead of thunderbolt we just got a better Ethernet. Then we could use any medium we wanted to.