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Comment by TheSpiceIsLife | Hacker News Reader

We want to help them move to the latest technology and peripherals, as well as accelerate the growth of this new ecosystem.

So just build laptops with some USB-C ports, so we can buy new things with USB-C and keep using our old things.

Dongles. What a circus.

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If they released a computer with two USB-C ports and two USB-A ports, every device manufacturer would continue to release all of their products for USB-A only and say "We've chosen to build our products to be compatible with all the old computers, you can use those USB-A ports for our products and the USB-C ports for somebody else's."

And then 5 years later, nobody's adopted USB-C yet because every computer still has USB-A ports and every accessory manufacturer wants to be as compatible as possible.

Apple is betting that the short-term inconvenience of a few dongles is worth it in order to force every accessory manufacturer to jump on the USB-C train immediately. I can't say I disagree with them.

Would placing only 1 USB-A port help at all in your opinion? Make it a bit tougher to use older products?

Hard to say how that would play out, but I wouldn't want the computer I'm going to be carrying around for the next 5 years to be thicker just to include a port that will hopefully be out of use within 1-2 years.

In the short term, my main desire for an A port would be for wireless mouse dongles or other people's flash drives. But I mostly switched to a bluetooth laptop mouse already, so I'm not sweating the mice. For my own flash drive, you can get one that supports both ports, but other people won't necessarily have one.

I think I'd still rather carry around an adapter for the short term and be able to transition completely off of USB-A when I no longer need it.

I personally don't care how thick my professional laptop is. I'd rather have a 12-hour battery, 32GB RAM, two DisplayPorts, a few TB3 ports, serial, network, audio in/out (+toslink), and 4-6 USB ports. I guess I want the Thinkpad P70, but I want it to run macOS, and not have a terrible track pad. There is currently no option for this. The Mac Pro used to be cool, and they could update it to make it great again. I'm not sure why they don't invest at all into the pro market. People have been saying this now for about 5 years, and Apple would obviously rather sell luxury consumer "lifestyle" laptops than serious professional tools.

It's not that I'm against thin-and-light, I just see that as fitting the needs of e.g. PMs and managers, and the MacBook / Air filled that need nicely. Now they've gone and made the mbp into the air, thinking that's what everyone wants and needs.

It's basically my dream laptop on account of the screen: wide gamut, variable refresh rate, great brightness and contrast. In the regard it's way nicer than the Air (which is what I have now). But I do any heavy lifting tasks on a (cheaper + Windows) desktop with an i7 and 32 GB of RAM, so my laptop doesn't need to be the beefiest machine in existence. Nor do I run piles of VMs or huge deep learning datasets. IMO it's a computer more for artists than it is for programmers, and that's driving a lot of the negativity about it on HN. We're mostly programmers on here.

On the USB-C note, I'm curious what happens to the Mac Pro now. They're pushing USB-C as the new standard for pro accessories, and yet the Mac Pro doesn't support it. As if being 3 years old wasn't bad enough, now it's 3 years old and has the wrong ports.

Here's hoping for an "Our bad, the new Mac Pro has USB-C, Thunderbolt 3, upgradeable GPUs and multiple drive bays," but I'm not holding my breath.

Am I the only programmer that uses tmux and vim with old fashioned makefile? I still need a serial port to talk with hardware but a simple usb dongle works. I remember people complain almost 15 years ago that apple didn't have a serial port on their laptops. Its funny that windows itself became the biggest problem for serial.

Not everyone uses USB ports on a regular basis (can't recall the last time my wife did on her Pro) and even fewer people would use more than one. So I'm inclined to think including even one USB-A port would significantly impact adoption of USB-C by third parties.

Quite the contrary. Apple has delusions of grandeur if it thinks it can change an entire industry with a less than 10% market share.

But they do. They removed optical drives and RJ45 jacks from their laptops. Most new laptops don't have these anymore.

Some competing models already just have USB Type C ports.

And the original iMac, which dropped all the old printer/keyboard/mouse/serial/SCSI/whatever connectors in favor of USB and FireWire.

Psssh, USB. Like that'll ever catch on... And Apple was a tiiiiny fraction of the market then compared to what they are now.

Anybody remember all the PS/2 to USB dongles? We got over it.

Optical drives didn't go extinct because Apple removed them, but because USB sticks were much more useful. RJ45 went extinct because everyone uses Wifi.

In both cases Apple didn't set a trend, it was inevitable.

But a USB-A mouse works perfectly, just like a wired headphone. There is not a clear advantage here.

Other manufacturers dropped them not because of apple though but because they were no longer needed.

My problem is Apple doesn't even sell an iOS device that comes with a USB C to Lightning cable. How the hell am I supposed to use Safari's web inspector, or record the screen, or profile my app?

Sure, I can buy another cable, but I feel like Apple should be swapping out Lighting<->USB A cables with the USB C equivilient for free.

Or shipping iOS devices w/ USB A-C adapter.

They probably won't do that for a couple of years until USB-C is firmly entrenched. Most iPhone customers aren't using Macbooks.

Am I unusual in never plugging my iPhone into my computer to begin with? Contacts/Calendar/Notes/Email/Backups all sync via iCloud, and even if you're still using iTunes to manage your music library (instead of one of the streaming services), that syncs over wifi.

I've got a phone charger in my bedroom and one in my bag and those are the only things it ever gets connected to.

Who cares what the other end of the cable is shaped like as long as it's the same kind as your charger?

I was thinking the same thing, I can't even remember the last time I plugged a phone into a computer. Even if you need to charge it, you're better off plugging it into the wall unless you have a lot of time to kill.

Not true. If you plug an iPhone into a recent Mac that is powered on, the Mac will often deliver more current than the iPhone wall charger will output. As a test, with my phone plugged into the computer, the Mac is delivering 2.1A over USB to the phone.

Source: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204377

Thanks, I stand corrected.

Nope. I'm sure the vast majority of iPhone customers never plug in their iPhones into a computer, which probably explains why they haven't bothered.

Adding on to this, the one scenario where it matters is if you buy a new USB-C to Lightning cable, that lets you travel with just the MBP's USB-C power brick. To charge the computer you plug it in. To charge the phone you plug it in. To charge both you plug the computer in and then plug the phone into the computer, since it's all the same port.

If you still had USB-A on the computer, you could potentially have traveled with only a laptop power supply, and then charged the phone via the laptop ports with the original cable. But I don't know anyone who travels without a phone charger thinking "eh, I'll just plug this into my computer to charge instead."

Never thought of that, that's actually very cool.

Isn't it a hallmark of Apple that all of their stuff usually works together though?

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