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Is anyone else getting serious connector fatigue? For so long, USB 2.0 with a Type-A connector was the standard. You saw Type-B connectors on printer cables, b
by UVB-76 10y ago
Is anyone else getting serious connector fatigue?
For so long, USB 2.0 with a Type-A connector was the standard. You saw Type-B connectors on printer cables, but the other end always had the reassuring Type-A connector.
Then along came USB 3.0, and USB 3.1, which have the same receptacle as 2.0, but aren't necessarily interchangeable. USB 3.x adoption is still lacklustre, so you now have a bunch of devices with different versions, and new systems come with a mixture of 2.0 and 3.0 ports. Why? Isn't 3.0 backwards compatible, and better?
Now we have USB Type-C, which doesn't bear any resemblance to anything which came before.
USB Type-C makes sense because it's smaller, but we already have a mind-boggling array of smaller USB connectors for mobile devices, like USB Mini-A and Mini-B (What's the difference? Did they elope to create Mini-AB?). Then Micro-A and Micro-B, which sound a lot like the Mini variants, but aren't. What the hell is Micro-B SuperSpeed, and why is it actually two ports?
While all this has been going on, three versions of Thunderbolt have emerged. Thunderbolt v1 and v2 inexplicably use a Mini DisplayPort connector. Thunderbolt v3 uses a USB Type-C connector, but isn't the same as USB Type-C. Or is it?
Meanwhile, the general population are still furious that Lightning came along and rendered half their iPod/iPhone/iPad accessories redundant.
I wouldn't mind Apple dropping USB Type-A ports in favor of Type-C for the new MacBook Pro, but I'd like some kind of reassurance that USB Type-C is going to last more than a couple of years...
- laurentdc 10y ago> I'd like some kind of reassurance that USB Type-C is going to last more than a couple of years... heh https://xkcd.com/927/ https://xkcd.com/927/ It's unrealistic to expect a single connector/cable/pinout to last for a very long time. Throughput requirements increase, size constraints do too, mechanical designs improve, etc. Even Firewire or SCSI looked like "the last interface you'll ever need" 15 years ago.
- _9MOTHER9HORSE 10y agoMy IO requirements haven't changed that dramatically in the past six years, and are still well served by a Mid-2010 MacBook Pro. I've got MagSafe for power, Mini DisplayPort for video out, Mini TOSLINK for audio out, and USB 2.0 for everything else. There's a gigabit Ethernet port if I want it, but otherwise 802.11n works just fine. I'd like faster data transfer (not that any of my peripherals are USB C compatible yet), but otherwise I don't really understand what the massive fragmentation of connector standards does for me.