The proliferation of various ports and interfaces has been disturbing, even in the PC arena where Thunderbolt is rather hypothetical.

Displays alone drive me insane these days. Twenty years ago, you had a VGA connector, and that was it. Then came DVI, which allegedly worked better with TFT panels. Then came HDMI, but there is also DisplayPort which appears to be similar, yet different. I have not seen a display or beamer that will accept DisplayPort input. Does such a thing even exist?

And laptops have, of course, the "mini" version of these, so there is mini-DisplayPort (which looks suspiciously like ThunderBolt) and there is mini-HDMI (which looks suspiciously like USB-C).

I am still telling myself this is a transition, and in five years everything will be USB-C. Once we are there, that sounds like a nice future, but I am not certain we'll get there in time. (Plus, a tea leaf got stuck my Galaxy Tab's USB-C port while riding the train - it took me an hour to scrape and shake everything out before that thing could be charged again. Something that never happened to me with good old USB ports for some reason, even though they were much larger.)