Hacker News Reader

Comment by cbhl | Hacker News Reader

USB-A had all of these compatibility concerns too, when it first came out. I remember having a Gateway All-in-One with only two USB-A ports in '98. You had to worry about USB 1 versus USB 2, and some devices wouldn't get enough power through a hub, and so forth.

I'm really looking forward to seeing where USB-C is in two or three years.

View on HN

I think his point is that it was a missed opportunity to learn from those exact mistakes

Things like passive hubs working poorly were not in the spec. This stuff is.

I was going to write something similar. This looks like most port transitions. Right now everything is a mess. In five years it probably won't be.

He does address this at the end. Also, a cable that doesn't support Thunderbolt and 100W charging will probably always be cheaper than one that does, and thus we should expect suboptimal cables to keep being sold.

It will also be lighter and thinner.

Try replacing "suboptimal" with "Pareto optimal" in your everyday life. It made a positive difference for me.

I’m too young to have experienced the transition, but were there cables that could fry your computer? https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2016/02/google-engineer-find...

A batch of cables was wired completely backwards. That could happen any time, to any kind of cable. So I'll go ahead and say 'yes'.

Oh, in those days, computers would fry themselves -- literally -- from overheating. CPU vendors raced to break the 1 GHz barrier, but thermal throttling wasn't as mature. If I pushed my computer too hard for too long (say, with a really tough ray trace) then it would just shut off uncleanly from being too hot.

The joke was you could fry an egg on your CPU because it got so hot:

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2002/03/01/how_to_fry_an_egg/ http://www.phys.ncku.edu.tw/~htsu/humor/fry_egg.html

Reply on news.ycombinator.com