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Comment by bigiain | Hacker News Reader

"If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses." -- Henry Ford

Nobody asked for USB ports when they had serial/parallel ports, or for the floppy drive to disappear, or to lose the VGA connector.

I don't know if Apple have made the right calls here (on either the USB-C ports or the keyboard), but they do have some history in making eventually-winning calls on at least some of these things. (That _also_ built the Newton, so I'm not gonna claim they _always_ get it right.)

It'll be interesting to see how these design decisions fare over then next 3-5 years...

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> Nobody asked for USB ports when they had serial/parallel ports, or for the floppy drive to disappear, or to lose the VGA connector.

I don't recall being annoyed by those changes. In particular, the VGA->DVI transition was handled really well. Just about everything was DVI-I and would accept a VGA signal over a DVI cable, so you just bought a VGA->DVI cable and continued using VGA.

So basically a “dongle?”

No dongle at all. Just a different cable. The adapter cables are fine. It's the devices that aren't attached via cables that are awkward.

Macs with USB but no SCSI connector were a big cause of complaints where I was back then (I worked around lots of designers with SCSI Syquest and Zip drives, and all their client archives of high-res photoshop and page layout work on them), and _everybody_ in my circles thought Apple were insane for leaving floppy drives off... (These were a long time back though...)

To be clear, I remember those transitions being very smooth, but I was a Windows user. The first machine I bought without a floppy drive was my laptop in 2005 when CD-RW had long since replaced floppies on the Sneakernet.

My school was mostly iMac G3s and I vaguely recall the lack of a floppy drive being annoying once or twice, but the Windows machines had floppy drives and you could easily share files on the network, so it was never a big deal.

Heh - my school had AppleIIs and BBC Micros. My first year at Uni we used a VAX 11/780. I guess we had somewhat different experiences.

On the other hand, I think the most impressive and smoothest transitions I've ever seen in the entire personal computer space were Apple's transition from 68K to PowerPC processors, and almost as smooth their transition from PowerPC to X86. I'm still incredibly impressed with the attention to detail they showed getting those major changes to work so smoothly for users.

> I don't recall being annoyed by those changes. In particular, the VGA->DVI transition was handled really well. Just about everything was DVI-I and would accept a VGA signal over a DVI cable, so you just bought a VGA->DVI cable and continued using VGA.

Just about everything was USB-C and would accept a USB-A signal over a USB-C cable, so you just bought a USB-C->USB-A cable and continued using USB-A.

I don't see a difference. Except the part where you say the transition was handled well. I didn't feel good applying that to USB-C...

There are a lot of USB devices that do not attach via a cable. You can't just use a different cable in that case, because you were not using one to begin with.

VGA devices always connected via a cable, so you weren't adding bulk. Even adapters for devices with integrated cables (grrr...) were pretty minor compared to the sheer heft of the VGA cable itself.

So do we just stick with USB-A forever?

Until the person who happens to be complaining personally upgrades their USB-A peripherals.

> Nobody asked for USB ports when they had serial/parallel ports, or for the floppy drive to disappear, or to lose the VGA connector.

I remember all of these technologies, and they all had major pain points. Serial and parallel ports were slow and needed tuning to work with IRQ/DMA (don't quote me on this), floppies were slow and unreliable and VGA was blurry on LCD monitors.

There's no current replacement for USB that does the job better. Nothing for HDMI. Same for SD cards. Nobody was asking to get rid of these ports so that they could use the next big thing. Apple had Thunderbolt 2 co-existing with USB on their older laptops, they could do the same with the newer ones. In fact, USB-C charging is limited to 100W, so 15" MacBook Pros run at their limit could power-throttle or lose charge when running intensive workloads.

FireWire. Arguably, the thunderbolt connector (only Apple ecosystem ever bought into it, although they were big enough to matter at that point.)

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