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Comment by systemtest | Hacker News Reader

I bought the first 13" Macbook Pro with the Thunderbolt port, expecting the whole world to switch to Thunderbolt in a couple of years. It was predicted that there would be Macbooks in the future with only Thunderbolt ports, as it could connect to everything.

Guess what, that didn't happen. It became a high-end niche market. Not saying that that's where USB-C will be going but I have a bad feeling about this.

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No, USB-C will be standard. What happened to Thunderbolt is what will happen to Lightning. USB-C is here to stay, and they should've put it in iPhone 7 as well.

Why should they have put it on the iPhone? People keep saying that, but nobody's actually given a good reason. It's not like you're going to be plugging any of your Mac peripherals into your iPhone. The only actual reason anyone seems to have is "so you can plug your iPhone into an Android charger", but that doesn't seem very compelling to me (do I even want to trust an Android charger?).

USB-C is supplanting microUSB ports just about everywhere, just like microUSB supplanted miniUSB. I don't understand why the iPhone isn't using it other than to allow people to use their iPhone 6 peripherals.

Lightning was first, there is a vibrant ecosystem in place around Made For iPhone accessories that use Lightning that a lot of existing iPhone users already own, the Lightning port and connector are smaller than USB-C which is probably useful in a few places (I saw someone suggest somewhere that the Apple Pencil wouldn't even be able to fit a USB-C connector), someone else also said that Lightning was designed to support the weight of the iPhone in a dock configuration but USB-C probably wasn't, etc. And there's not really any benefit to switching to USB-C besides being able to re-use Android chargers, which isn't something that Apple or most of their customers particularly cares about.

Do I want one cable to charge my old macbook, one for my iphone 7 work phone, and one for my private pixel xl, or do i want one cable that can charge them all (the new macbook and the android phone now works)? or maybe 2 for a spare? And speaking of spares, I always have one extra at home to replace any that get broken. Having the same standard everywhere means I need only one spare. Instead of one spare per type.

> do I even want to trust an Android charger?

I don't know what this means. I'm reading this as "Do I even trust a USB-C charger", which you can safely do if you buy something that adheres to the standards. A lot of chinese knock-offs don't, but the point of standards is that you shouldn't have to care.

USB-C has a better chance, being effectively USB under the hood with a better connector. There were zero thunderbolt phones. I'm typing this comment on a Pixel with a C port.

90%+ released phones will have USB-C in late 2017 I wager. The alternative mode stuff may take a year or two to sort out though

There's a big difference between thunderbolt and thunderbolt 3/usb c. The former was proprietary by Apple/Intel, and very expensive, so no one else added it to their machines, and onlu very high end accessories included it. Usb C is the new standard that is already being adopted by most manufacturers, so I'm very confident it will spread quite fast. Not saying that launching a professional laptop in 2016 with just 4 usb c ports was a good idea though, but I guess they're really pushing for the standard to be adopted as quick as possible.

Thunderbolt 3 is still insanely expensive. The Akitio Thunder2 PCIe Box is $229.00, the Thunder3 Pcie Expansion Box is $299 and if you wanted to do a go-around by buying a converter, that's also $70 -- the StarTech.com Thunderbolt 3 to Thunderbolt Adapter is $73.99. By economies of scale TB3 ought to be cheaper but it is not. Other docks are even more expensive, the Powercolor Devil Box is $375 and the Razer Core is $399 but only if you buy a Razer laptop otherwise $499. To compare, an M.2 to PCIe DIY solution from a noname company without warranty is roughly $100 so the $229 price is pretty OK. The TB3 box, however, needs to drop to half price and then we are talking.

And Thunderbolt of yore was not Apple only by far, HP, Dell, Lenovo all had mobile workstations sporting it. Heck, the Thinkpad T430s had it. Of course, it's all different now, practically all $1000 and over laptops have TB3.

I bought the first Macbook with a thunderbolt port 5 years ago and I bought my first Thunderbolt peripheral 2 months ago.

In those 5 years I've never seen anybody using Thunderbolt for anything other than connecting a monitor.

I use the thunderbolt to Ethernet adaptor sometimes. That's about it.

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