Hacker News Reader

Until some bright spark had the idea to make Thunderbolt 3 share a connector with USB-C. And then Apple (inter alia) released laptops that were either USB-C+Thunderbolt 3 -or- purely USB-C (12" MacBook), making life complicated for folks doing IT support in mixed environments.

It Just Works, Unless It Doesn't™

View on HN

Ah, you too enjoy the dongle lifestyle.

Apple seems to be moving things forward, where others still keep some seriously legacy options, but neither option is pain free.

hasn't this always happened with internal connectors? SATA rev 1 (1.5Gbps, 2003) used the same connector as SATA rev2 (3Gbps, 2004) & SATA rev 3 (6Gbps, 2009) so drives and motherboards plugged together and operated but at the slowest common speed between them.

is USB-C somehow different that people expect Thunderbolt 3 (Dec 2015) using a connector introduced in Aug 2014 on a 12" Macbook announced in March 2015?

No, this was always an issue, even in times when you enjoyed yourself with incompatibilities between different RS-232 implementation, VGA cables, DVI digital/analogue mess, FireWire burning out ports and more.

The world where a plug was enough to identify underlying protocol in 100% of never fail cases never existed.

However, nostalgia deletes enough memory for us to whine about times that never existed ;)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com