I am simply amazed by how much money this company makes. Nice boost to Mac business with the new Macbook Pros selling like hotcakes and OOS constantly.
Content creators rely on SD cards everyday and cameras actively sold today use it.
Devices stopped being shipped with USB-A a long time ago now.
(Yes, photographers use SD cards although they often connect cameras directly and USB SD readers are cheap.)
Are you talking about Macs or devices in general? My 2021 laptop has an SD card slot, x2 USB A and x2 USB C (well, Thunderbolt 4). Despite how much I like USB C (all the devices I take with me have it), USB A is still here and will be for quite a while.
Oh, I forgot to mention that my laptop also has (full-sized!) HDMI and a headphone jack.
I interpreted this to mean the male side. Sure you can still buy laptops that accept USB-A, but I haven't seen any peripheral that still uses USB-A in a long time. I'm sure you could still buy a thumb drive with USB-A, but I wouldn't.
Wired Mice, Wired Keyboards, Thumb drives, external hard drives, printers, webcams, external cd/dvd/bluray drives, etc..
What peripherals do you look at? Barely any of them use USB-C unless they're explicitly USB-C docks, or Thunderbolt peripherals.
But every new device today is overwhelmingly shipping with USB-C.
All of my caddies use that weird micro-USB plug that can do USB-3, which is cool. In theory it'd be easy to convert that to USB-C... just change the plug on the end, or just make both ends USB-C. I typically find those cables to not lock into the port very well.
The storage solutions you listed (thumb drives, hard drives, optical drives) aren't used daily by most people, and are all widely available with USB-C.
Also, yes many mice and keyboards do come with Bluetooth. But all of the ones that require dongles for wireless are only USB-A. No USB-C Logitech Unifying/Bolt receivers.
USB C has replaced microUSB for most devices, but USB A still dominates by a long margin.
Doesn't necessarily mean they use USB-C though. Logitech's Unifying receivers are still (sadly) reliant upon USB-A, although someone modified one of them to use USB-C instead[0] :-)
There are plenty of fairly common USB-A peripherals still in use anyways. A lot of audio interfaces, mice, keyboards and webcams rely on low-bandwidth but ubiquitous ports like USB-A. Apple and their pride would never put one on a modern Mac, but we're really at an impasse: neither side will adopt either standard, so it's more likely that we'll simply see wireless peripherals gain popularity instead. Not exactly bad, but kinda an asinine take for a company that just released a professional desktop computer with USB-A, but refused to add it to their laptops.
Now if only my car had a USB-C plug…
I use it for noncritical data because the sd card is slow and it could fail. Mainly recent downloads or video files.
USB-A is a legacy connector and needs to just die already.
They are actively looking at how to transmit data over the Magsafe adapter. Once that happens there will be no ports.
My theory is that Apple made commitments to keep supporting the Lightning connector on their phones for a number of years to get manufacturers to create devices with it.
Say whatever you want, when it was introduced it was clearly a big improvement over the micro USB connectors everyone else was using. By now it’s holding them back though.
Honestly - the USB-A port should have been wiped out a couple years ago - the only reason it didn't is that everyone has this massive legacy of USB-A ports (Hotels, Airports, Airplanes, etc...) that people plug into, which kept them holding onto those legacy peripherals longer than they should have. Also - some weird hardware dongles that haven't been upgraded to USB-C.
What we need to do is start seeing how quickly Hotels/Cars/Airplanes/Airports/... start switching over to USB-C. When that happens there will be this massive cascade effect - it will be exponential:
2022 - ~0% of legacy is USB C
2023 - 1% legacy USB-C
2024 - 2% legacy USB-C
2025 - 4% legacy USB-C
2026 - 8% legacy USB-C
2027 - 16% legacy USB-C
2028 - 32% legacy USB-C
2029 - 64% legacy USB-C
2030 - 90% legacy USB-C
2031 - 95% legacy USB-C
What's the USB-C story nowadays if you have N USB-C peripherals and M USB-C ports where N > M?
Most USB-C hubs seem to have one USB-C for connecting to the computer, one USB-C for connecting to a peripheral, and then a bunch of USB-A for connecting to more peripherals.
To get something that actually increases the number of USB-C peripherals, especially if more than one of your peripherals needs more than low power, and is reliable it appears that you have to get a Thunderbolt 3 or 4 dock and it is pretty pricey.
Until there are cheap reliable 1 to many USB-C hubs USB-A is not going to go away.
Yes adapters are possible, however an even better solution (in that it doesn't require remembering to bring an adapter everywhere) is just to buy a different brand of laptop.
I've found a single, compact USB-C hub does fine for me, but of course YMMV.
For example, I work at a university, in an office. If my laptop lacked the normal USB port, I'd probably have an adapter or hub in my backpack or at my desk. But if I'm in a rush to a meeting, I might just grab my laptop and not my backpack. So, if somebody needs to share a file using a bog standard USB drive, I'm out of luck.
I'm capable of adapting around this and it isn't a huge hassle really, but... my current laptop is cheaper than a... any Macbook, I think, and thinner than a Macbook pro, and still ASUS managed to fit in a USB-A (and even a legacy HDMI!) port. I dunno. It is ASUS, I don't think they've got any wild engineering talent that would blow Apple's mind... it just doesn't seem very hard.
- [1] https://satechi.net/products/aluminum-usb-c-to-usb-a-adapter...
Pretty much all new keyboards, even niche ones, now come with Type C standard. Plus you are making a huge deal out of the graceful degradation of attaching an adapter to your keyboard. If we’re going to permanently retrofit something its going to be your keyboard—not the macbook.
I upgrade my gear regularly. And because of that I pretty much never use USB A. Apple designs their products for people who upgrade their gear. If they add a USB A to my shiny new laptop it’d be quite annoying because it is 1 extra port that I will never use that is probably there at the expense of another Type C port.
Yes obviously, if I get all new peripherals with USB-C compatibility (other than things like my keyboard and mouse, which don't have USB-C versions, and which are actually my favorite peripherals) then I won't encounter USB-A. Unless I leave my house, where the rest of the world hasn't upgraded to USB-C yet.
Annoying but fine. Don’t think about it much.
Edit: YMMV but Macbook is not the only offender. Comes up with random combinations of things because cars, desks, cafes, etc all have a mix of USB A/C charging ports. And so do my various devices. The adapters are useful all the time.
They’re out there.
Would a USB A be nice? Probably.
So of course you're seeing USB-A mice because they are probably old models from the 2000s.
They have two USB-A mice and one mouse that has USB-C, Bluetooth, and their own wireless interface. Depending on what you mean by "normal" that is either 3 or 2 normal wired mice.
https://www.logitech.com/en-us/products/mice.html?filters=co...
It’s worked great for years.
downside are the two usb-c and the endless accessories that are quite expensive