Lack of Native Thunderbolt in Z390 motherboards

[pawinda]

I've looked at the specs for the ASRock and Gigabyte Z390 now listed on their sites as of Saturday Oct. 6th, 2018, and none have native Thunderbolt with a rear panel connector, only Thunderbolt headers which require an AIC in a PCIe slot. Is this because the Z390 is compatible with both 8th and 9th Gen Intel CPU's and the 8th gen cpu's don't have Thunderbolt?

 

[kanewolf]

It is probably because the manufacturers don't believe that is a feature that costs more than the number of buyers it will attract.