Comment by joesmo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by joesmo | Hacker News Reader

Having a single non-standard, unsupported (usb c) port for everything isn't progress, it's regress. No one wants this, especially for headphones but Apple and another clueless follower are pushing it anyway because they have the clout and they think people will buy it. Sounds like FireWire to me. That was an amazing success. Or thunderbolt. Or thunderbolt 2. Yeah I think it's clear by now Apple has an abysmal track record with such changes. Throw in something any knowledgeable consumer is against like removing the headphone jack and now you have a recipe for disaster. I hope so, not because I like others' pain but because this change, along with others, marks an anti consumer shift in policy. No longer does Apple even care what the consumer wants because it has the zombie sheep factor of millions of clueless idiots who will buy products that are clearly not in their best interests and require extra investment for no reason. Then again, Apple is hardly alone in such markets.

That's always been Apple's advantage. Trying to serve everybody's needs is what Windows was for a long time. Apple has a history of breaking compatibility and screwing over the few holdouts of the old products. I think that freedom is what allows them to design things that people really like. Now they have "zombie sheep", they can do even better without being forced to follow the market.

> Apple has an abysmal track record with such changes

Really?

Apple went all-USB, people complained. USB mice and keyboard became the standard.

Apple dropped the floppy drive, people complained. No floppy drive became the standard.

Apple dropped the CD drive, people complained. No CD drive (on laptops) became the standard.

Apple dropped full-size display connectors, people complained. This, too, became the standard on laptops.

> Apple dropped the CD drive, people complained. No CD drive (on laptops) became the standard.

> Apple dropped full-size display connectors, people complained. This, too, became the standard on laptops.

You need to step out of that Apple reality distortion field, not every laptop is an ultrabook.

Next time you go to a coffee shop, airport or train station, etc. look at the laptops you see and count how many have an optical drive.

Yes, some people do still have the older corporate IT bricks but even there the trend has clearly been to optimize for size and battery life. Display connectors are a bit of a confound since e.g. an HDMI connector is already a huge improvement over a VGA/DVI port but are clearly on a similar trajectory.

Yeah but it isn't like Apple invented the idea of the ultrabook.

The ultrabook was almost entirely a reaction to the MacBook Air. Read initial press reports about the ultrabook, they make that obvious. Like http://www.pcworld.com/article/246691/ultrabooks_laptops_as_...

The MacBook Air was almost entirely a reaction to the eeePC. Probably not really, but just as much as ultrabooks were to the macbook air.

Yes, the MacBook Air was a reaction to netbooks. But it was a different category of device, a high-end ultraportable. The same category of device that Ultrabooks fit into.

I don't see anyone making that claim. All of the major players experimented with small laptops – just as there were small PowerBooks, there were small ThinkPads, Vaios, etc. going back to the 1980s. – but for a long time the engineering tradeoffs were too extreme.

People will complain about anything.

> Apple dropped full-size display connectors, people complained. This, too, became the standard on laptops.

Not really. They had a few generations that just had a DisplayPort connector. Now Macbook Pros have HDMI plugs, which are full sized connectors these days.

> Apple went all-USB, people complained. USB mice and keyboard became the standard.

LOL. Apple started with Apple Desktop Bus and then when that failed they tried unsuccessfully to force Firewire on their users and only caved and went with USB when literally the rest of the world switched to USB.

> Apple dropped the floppy drive, people complained. No floppy drive became the standard.

I don't think Apple was the first company to make a computer without a floppy.

> Apple dropped the CD drive, people complained. No CD drive (on laptops) became the standard.

I don't think Apple was the first company to drop the CD drive.

Moreover how is "lack of something" a standard?

> Apple dropped full-size display connectors, people complained. This, too, became the standard on laptops.

You live in a bubble. Did you know that lots / most of non-Apple products use HDMI outputs?

Apple has a long history of foisting "nonstandards" on its users (and then selling them God-awfully-expensive cables). Starting with ADB and SCSI, AppleTalk, Firewire, Thunderbolt, DisplayPort, etc. I've been an Apple customer since before the Mac existed, and I've had to put up with Apple's insistence of constantly opposing whatever connector trend was mainstream with the rest of the world.

> LOL. Apple started with Apple Desktop Bus and then when that failed they tried unsuccessfully to force Firewire on their users and only caved and went with USB when literally the rest of the world switched to USB.

You really need to learn about the subject before trying to “correct” other people:

* ADB had a 13 year run starting in 1986: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Desktop_Bus

* Firewire is a standard (IEEE 1394) and was intended as a replacement for high-performance SCSI interfaces, which is why it focused on transfer speed and scalability at the expense of cost — and was complete overkill for keyboards, mice, etc. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE_1394#History_and_developm...

* Apple was the first major manufacturer to standardize on USB and helped drive its adoption – in fact, it wasn't until the second generation iMac before they even added a Firewire port: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USB#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IMac_G3#iMac_.28tray-loading.2...

This is particularly amusing for anyone who was around in the 90s because back then there were more than a few people like you were decrying USB as Apple's attempt to get consumers to waste a ton of money replacing perfectly good hardware just to have a new connector with, as they felt was obvious, no significant benefit to the user.

As for the rest of your “points” do note that you're arguing against “Apple was first” claims which were never made. Each of the actual statements made are simply factual — every time Apple dropped a feature, people complained. They got over it and most of the market turned out not to care but that doesn't mean that there weren't opinion pieces, angry rants, etc.

> This is particularly amusing for anyone who was around in the 90s

But that's just it: I was around in the 1990s and I owned Macs and PCs throughout that period.

ADB had a 13-year run, sure, but it wasn't a "standard" for any device except a Mac. PCs used PS/2 connectors.

Firewire is a standard, but Apple was the only company really pushing it.

You're right - and I'm dead wrong - about Apple pushing USB.

> it wasn't until the second generation iMac before they even added a Firewire port

I thought Firewire was a common option on G3s in the late 1990s? May be misremembering.

> was intended as a replacement for high-performance SCSI interfaces

Thanks for bringing that up. Yes at the time SCSI interfaces were more high-performance than IDE (and allowed more devices) but only at the expense of the more common emergent standard of IDE / EIDE.

You do raise some good points however, and you're also right that of course Firewire wasn't a replacement for ADB, I'm not really sure why I said that :(

Lack of an optical drive is not a result of innovation by the hardware makers.

The ability to install any OS from a USB (as well as USB capacity improvements), streamable music and Steam game libraries as well as overall penetration of broadband simply made including an optical drive pointless from a data density standpoint, especially on laptops, where space is at a premium.

The exact case goes for the floppy.

Sure, it's not an innovation, but dropping it early or first, to push people to move to alternatives, is a bold move.

> non-standard

Check again. "The USB Type-C Specification 1.0 was published by the USB Implementers Forum and was finalized in August 2014." (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USB_Type-C)

USB Type C is a de jure standard only: the de facto standards are 3.5mm TRSS for analog audio and Micro-USB for charging and PC connections.

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