Nothing rages me more than beeing unable to copy a 5GB file (4GB limit on FAT32) on an USB stick just because a PC and a Mac are actively _not_ willing to cooperate.
Recently discovered my TV was able to read ext4, never looked back :)
Recently discovered my TV was able to read ext4, never looked back :)
The only reason I ever use flash drives nowadays is to format an operating system.
Here's one of mine: When you want to transfer files between two machines which (for whatever reason) can't be on the same network, and you don't want to install additional software into the environment.
Depending on the files and the network involved, using a USB-stick (or any other physical media) can often be easier and faster than trying to find a network-bridge for your files.
In the case of my tv, it doesn't support wireless, and installing cables is out of the question.
There might be other ways, but honnestly I'm fine with copying bulk medias from to to time on a physical storage
Portable HDDs are bigger, more expensive, more fragile, and generally worse in every way (except transfer speeds) than USB flash drives for occasional short-haul data transfers. Writing 10G+ images onto a cheap 16G USB drive and throwing it across the office is a relatively common occurrence here.
"Who uses cable Ethernet these days" - I had to twice in the past year - a hotel in Germany that provided internet via a cable. And when the router decided to loose the WIFI password and I had to use an old laptop to physically connect.
I don't use USB sticks very often myself, but I am sure there are tons of scenarios where people find it useful. Just because it doesn't match any of your use cases is no justification.
As for your ethernet example, that's too bad. Wifi capabilities will get better for every year that passes, too.
I beg to differ. I've gone from 802.11g to n to ac and I've yet to see any noticeable gains bringing me even close to plain old Gigabit ethernet.
It cannot compete nor compare when it comes down to even individual aspects: reliability, individual throughput, total throughput (due to shared medium access), nor setup speeds.
I'm not just talking "a little bit slower". I'm talking 1 minute guaranteed to succeed (ethernet), vs 1 hour guaranteed to fail (wifi). In real world performance, it's orders of magnitudes slower. That's measurable. That's a fact.
For lots of use-cases wifi is utterly useless. Have fun trying to backup media to a iSCSI volume over wifi for instance.
I'm guessing you don't live in a heavily populated area where the wifi-bands are over-consumed and have little more effective BW than 25mbps to offer. The same crap I was promised would improve half a decade ago. It haven't.
A huge part of the tech-hungry power-users lives in these places and suffers through this subpar performance. We're not happy with mediocre wifi to cover our needs.