Apple makes 23 different dongles – and it would cost you $857 to buy them all | Hacker News Reader

Apple makes 23 different dongles – and it would cost you $857 to buy them all

uk.businessinsider.com

25 pointsdjvdorp13 comments

You'd never need all of these though, would you? There is a lot of overlap between the dongles that unless you had a lot of devices you wouldn't require. For example I can't see anyone buying an HDMI to DVI + a Lightning to VGA + a Mini Displayport to DVI. Feels a little bit like saying ford make xx models of car & it would cost you £1 million to buy them all.

Title is very silly, just trying to jump on the dongle hate train. I don't have or own any dongles despite my many Apple devices (technically I have one for my iPhone 7 with headphones, but I have air pods if I ever need headphones). I think Apple knows most consumers don't need dongles at all.

I actually have most of these because I tend to buy new Apple equipment, and try to connect it to old non-apple equipment.

Something like a lightning to VGA adapter is a must have in my household.

Why? What about your previous non-dongle needing equipment was so inferior you replaced it for a new Mac and yet you didn't replace the VGA monitor? Some kind of exceedingly rare edge case?

while VGA is getting quite old, generally speaking a monitor will outlive several computers.

That one should absolutely be an adapter. An iPhone with a VGA port? Hahaha...

Personally, I would prefer the option for 23 dongles (most of which I will never use, or buy) to a multitude of ports on my laptop (most of which I will never use). The first seems like it provides me options, the second seems like it adds unnecessary failure points and openings to a delicate machine.

You can think of extra ports as failure points but you can also think of them as redundancy. Having a single port to connect everything causes a lot of wear on a single point of failure.

That's why there are 4 USB-C/TB3 ports on the new MacBook Pros (2 on the cheapest one). The new iMac only has 2 USB-C/TB3 ports, but also retains all the legacy ones.

So the only issue is with the 12" MacBook and its single USB-C port. Yep, that's a point of failure, but for it's intended users it's alright. On previous laptops you'd be screwed if you lost your AC adapter port anyway.

Note that for every single one of those dongles, there are a handful of manufacturers that offer the same quality for half the price. It's not an issue that they have such a large offering for connectivity, it's that their items are overpriced, I mean $30 for a Lightning to 30-pin adapter, what a racket.

This reminds me of the dongle hell of the 90's; Apple had done so well once Jobs got back onboard; it was at the end of his tenure that MDP took over, and then Tbolt, that brought us right back into the nickel and diming, "we have a $30-80 solution for your problem."

First-world problems

This title is ridiculous. I'm not even going to click on it.

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