3 ms·

Anecdotes are not data. I can easily counter yours with mine: I use such a dongle a lot whenever I am presenting on conferences etc, and have been doing so for

Anecdotes are not data. I can easily counter yours with mine: I use such a dongle a lot whenever I am presenting on conferences etc, and have been doing so for many years (even before the all-out for USB-C/Thunderbolt on MacBooks, there were no VGA ports, while many projectors still were; now I see a lot of HDMI, but still need the adaptor). And I habe yet to have a single issue caused by that! Sure, damaged VGA cables and other weirdness, but never ever anything tracing back to the dongle. In the same time I helped lots of people who struggled with their laptops with builtin VGA/HDMI Granted, usually not the laptops fault but rather PEBKAC / or people not knowing how to control Windows / Linux. Doesn't really matter: my point is that I see zero correlation between dongle usage and projector troubles.

phkahler 6y ago
>> Anecdotes are not data. Yes they are. The singular form of data is datum, not anecdote. A personal experience is a data point. A 2nd hand story may well be an anecdote. "I have this and use it for that" is very much data in this case. Is it enough to make product design decisions? No. Should Apple throw it out as an outlier? I would argue no - to think one person is a special snowflake with a unique problem is a mistake too.
p_l 6y ago
HDMI to VGA conversion, even through displayport connector, is much simpler topic than properly handling USB-C feature negotiation, and as I mentioned in another comment, it was common for USB-C dongles to exhibit problems, especially on macOS (non-Apple branded dongles tended to have better success rate on non-mac systems, Apple-branded dongles were consistently problematic on everything). Usual case was that with dongles, the display wasn't detected, at all, and having spent quite a bit of time fiddling with it, it didn't seem fixable.
- Godel_unicode 6y ago
  My org has an entire batch of OEM USB-C to HDMI dongles which work great on Dell, Lenovo, and Microsoft laptops but will reliably cause Macs to crash and reboot within 5 minutes.

phkahler 6y ago

>> Anecdotes are not data. Yes they are. The singular form of data is datum, not anecdote. A personal experience is a data point. A 2nd hand story may well be an anecdote. "I have this and use it for that" is very much data in this case. Is it enough to make product design decisions? No. Should Apple throw it out as an outlier? I would argue no - to think one person is a special snowflake with a unique problem is a mistake too.

p_l 6y ago

HDMI to VGA conversion, even through displayport connector, is much simpler topic than properly handling USB-C feature negotiation, and as I mentioned in another comment, it was common for USB-C dongles to exhibit problems, especially on macOS (non-Apple branded dongles tended to have better success rate on non-mac systems, Apple-branded dongles were consistently problematic on everything). Usual case was that with dongles, the display wasn't detected, at all, and having spent quite a bit of time fiddling with it, it didn't seem fixable.

Godel_unicode 6y ago
My org has an entire batch of OEM USB-C to HDMI dongles which work great on Dell, Lenovo, and Microsoft laptops but will reliably cause Macs to crash and reboot within 5 minutes.