calling USB A “legacy” and a “relic” is so misplaced. we all still own USB A devices. I challenge the author to go find a wired keyboard or mouse that comes with a USB C plug. it’s possible, but not easy.
the thing is, we could just have both! this isn’t some winner/loser scenario. the real question should be why these computers with enough bandwidth for 11+ connectors don’t at least split the difference with 6/5 of each. gives device manufacturers enough confidence that customers will be able to plug in the thing they bought, and gives consumers the ability to plug in anything and everything they need. then in 5 years when things have advanced we can start talking about entirely consolidating on USB C.
Almost every device I’ve bought in 2023 is usb-c now, even low end stuff, and keyboards and mice. By 2025 I’d expect it’ll be rare and unusual to see a micro port on any new device. USB A is definitely legacy.
PCs still come with half a dozen or more USB-A ports and only a single USB-C port (if you're lucky). Dongles, flash drives, webcams and the like are still prominently USB-A. Logitech's lineup is still mostly USB-A. I'm not sure that there will even be a full transition to USB-C, but if so, it will take quite a while.
I just bought a new device that came with a USB-A to USB-B cable!!!! the horror!! Makes sense, as it pretty much functions like a printer, only subtractive instead of additive process. Then it has Bluetooth instead of WiFi for wireless!?!?
I bought a new machine last week (Intel NUC 13 Extreme). It has three Type-C ports of which two are Thundebolt. We are slowly getting somewhere. Meanwhile my phones, displays, keyboards, all use Type-C connectors. Though some came with a USB-C to A converter.
Counterpoint: I also bought a new machine, a couple of weeks ago (Optiplex 7010 Micro). It has six USB A ports, four of them USB 3 and two of them USB 2 only, with the option to add a single USB-C port (or instead an extra DP or HDMI or even VGA or serial port); if you add that option, that USB-C port (which has DP alt mode) can be used to power the computer (instead of using the barrel plug), which is nice.
Very high end devices might have more than a single USB-C port (which is probably your case, given the "extreme" in the name), and these ports might even be Thunderbolt or USB4, but that's still rare. In my opinion, we are still in the USB-C equivalent of the "only two USB 2 ports, if you want more get a PCI add-on card" phase we had in the serial/parallel/PS2 to USB migration back in the day.
PC motherboards are often like a study in the history of PC motherboards with vestigial functionality that hasn’t been in widespread use in decades. That’s a fairly poor indicator, and I think it largely happens to buffer the feature sheet, take advantage of cheap pricing on components over time, and copy and paste functionality in their design software. It’s over. The only place for a USB-A is on an aftermarket USB hub. That’s ok. It was nice while it lasted, but it’s time to move on.
There is no incentive for manufacturers to use USB-C over USB-A for applications that neither use charging nor need above-USB-2.0 speeds. A lot of peripherals and gadgets fall into that category. Another factor is the limitation on available PCIe lanes depending on chipset. If you can provide 8-10 USB ports, you won’t be able to give all of them USB 3 speeds, and having USB-C ports with different speeds on the same device would be weird, as there is no color-coding mechanism like with USB-A.
i think the GP was talking about wired peripherals that plug into usb-a ports on the computer side, not wireless mice/keyboards which use usb-c to charge
my current wireless mouse/wired keyboard have usb-c on the peripheral end but I still use usb-a to connect them to the computer
Micro-USB is a variant of the USB-B connector. The whole point of A and B was that A ports were used on the "host" system, and B were used on the peripheral. If you remember USB On-the-Go, that was an attempt to reverse the trend and allow a USB-B device (including micro ports) to act as a host.
USB-C erased that distinction in favor of a full duplex network connection between two hosts.
USB-OTG ports are technically mini-AB and micro-AB ports that can fit both A and B plugs.
And USB-C is neither full-duplex (at least not for USB 2) nor host-to-host; there is a protocol negotiation and some devices can never act as hosts, although some can indeed assume both host and device roles.
Even in a “host-to-host connection”, only one side will act as the host.
In the same sense that A and B are variants of each other, sure.
Even though it's called micro-B, the design is closer to A, and micro supports both ends with basically the same plug. I would never refer to it as just "B". "B" means the square plug.
If we're being pedantic, it's USB Micro-B - more specifically the High-Speed variant. There's also USB Micro-A and USB Micro-AB, and all three have SuperSpeed variants which are twice the size.
I wasn't being pedantic though. USB-B is in my experience used to refer to the square plug (commonly found in printers). Micro-USB seemed like a closer approximation to what I though that poster was referring to.
> I challenge the author to go find a wired keyboard or mouse that comes with a USB C plug..
I can confirm, it's a journey. It's the same kind of journey than finding a hair trimmer that charges on USB C.
I see it more as makers being complacent and not giving a fuck though. There's no technical reasons for those to be USB A, and the USB C ones work great.
So yes USB A will be there for a while, and more often than not it's a symbolic middle finger to the buyer, a signal that a product should probably be avoided.
> USB A will be there for a while, and more often than not it's a symbolic middle finger to the buyer, a signal that a product should probably be avoided.
You have exceptionally strong opinions about USB A and C.
Micro USB is the real bane of it, but the time I spent to find USB-C versions of so many devices, including mices, made the issue a lot more personal I think.
I kinda hate that we're stuck in dongle town for so long now. And going wireless brings in the charging issues. Computer makers are also to blame, but I think that ship has sailed.
So yes USB A will be there for a while, and more often than not it's a symbolic middle finger to the buyer, a signal that a product should probably be avoided.
maybe it’s the opposite, it’s a warm hug reassuring you that they’re not going to change things just because some of the cool kids are.
> There's no technical reasons for those to be USB A, and the USB C ones work great.
There's a good technical reason for keyboards and mice to still be USB A: adapters from USB A socket to USB C plug are allowed by the standard, but adapters from USB C socket to USB A plug are forbidden (because they would, together with a common USB C cable, allow creating the forbidden USB A to USB A cable). This means that USB A keyboards and mice can be used in both USB A ports and (with a simple passive adapter) USB C ports, while USB C keyboards and mice could be used only on USB C ports.
Therefore, until having enough free USB C ports in computers is common enough, using USB A ports (with an optional adapter to USB C on the box) on the keyboard or mouse makes sense. This is similar to how, during the transition from serial and PS/2 mice to USB mice, it was common for them to come with a adapter which allowed them to be used either on a USB port or (with the adapter) on a PS/2 port.
>because they would, together with a common USB C cable, allow creating the forbidden USB A to USB A cable
Not hard to do this regardless. Amazon sells A-to-A cables[0]; and Unicomp keyboards for example have a USB-A port in the back, and connect to PCs with a bundled A-to-A cable. Seems like preventing this is a lost cause.
On keyboard it's easy enough to just put a USB-C port on the keyboard and let users either use an A-C or C-C cable.
For mice, having a hardwired cable probably still makes sense in terms of bulk and strain relief, but I suspect that wireless mice are also far more common.
> There's no technical reasons for those to be USB A, and the USB C ones work great
Except that all of their plans already have USB A in them. They'd have to rework the plans. Then, rework the lines making them. Then they'd have 2 versions for a period of time. Someone in accounting and logistics would have to do more work.
Seems like a perfect time to bring that conversation to a halt with the "if it's not broke, don't fix it" line.
At introduction there were billions of USB A peripherals and few users with USB C ports. The only sane thing for peripherals to do is ship USB A not wanting to cut out 99% of the market and the only sane thing given that for PCs to do is ship mostly USB A ports. So we start with an obvious optimal choice on all parties parts right now how do we break out of a trivial equilibrium into a mostly USB C universe?
If a PC ships with mostly USB C ports. Well since the majority of accessories are A users are going to be frustrated when they need adapters/a hub to plug in anything because they don't have enough of the ports accessories actually use.
If accessories shift first then users are going to be frustrated when they need adapters or a hub to have enough ports to plug in their accessories.
Remember that the average user keeps a computer for 6 years and they keep accessories longer often throwing things out when they literally stop working or can't be made to work with their new device.
Furthermore even a slight increase in costs is problematic when you margins are fairly razor thing. It's a really hard sell for anyone to move forward.
Apple has a substantial advantage here wherein they have enough good will from their users, enough margin, and enough sway to simply upgrade and tell their users to buy adapters while neither losing profit nor users.
That being said being A is hardly a middle finger for the vast majority of devices which need neither more power/more speed than usb 3.2 2x1 can provide as we are talking about 10Gbps and 15W. The most common accessories are mouse,keyboard,sound,cameras,small storage, less commonly network adapters
We haven't yet found a compelling case for a beefy connection but surely there is right.
High end video capture, high end storage, displays, hubs that serve many fast devices, 10Gbps Ethernet.
None as common as the previously listed and not fun to get working when not every port supports high power, higher speed, or optional features nor every cord. Using such features feels like the plug and pray of the early 90s whereas plugging in a DisplayPort monitor or a standard stereo jack speaker system is as boring as plugging in a toaster.
Many common power plugs were standardized 50-100 years ago. Compared to them, even USB-A is still new. If all you need is power delivery, there is little reason to switch to yet another plug type, which only exists because of unrelated requirements in other industries.
That is fairly meaningless, though. My six year old CODE keyboard could be USB-C today if I wanted, it uses a detachable USB cable. They wouldn't even need to make any changes to the keyboard other than including a different cable.
Note that these are keyboards and not mouses, and they have USB-C sockets rather than permanently attached cables with USB-C plugs. They are also very premium products.
When it comes to the entire ecosystem, a $5 bargain-bin noname OEM keyboard with permanently-attached cable is more representative - and those definitely don't come with USB-C yet. That would probably add a few cents to their BOM, so it simply isn't worth it yet.
If you get it wrong 50% of the time let me substantially reduce that for you: logo goes 'up' for whatever the normal orientation of your device is. That should clear up 99% of the cases.
Eww that's weird, ok in your case you are out of luck. That's pretty strange though, I have a ton of USB-A devices here and they are all in line with the way I outlined. So that's a bit of a surprise but it may well be an exception.
As for the ones that are sideways: the 'bottom' of the case is the bottom of the motherboard, so if you think of it that way it might still work for all but the top side ones.
I had a Cooler Master case where the IO stack at the top of the case had the opposite orientation (logo down). Threw me off forever.
I'm at a point in my life where I've just given up and figure that I'm only going to get it right 1/3rd of the time anyway: Nope, turn; nope, turn; yup.
Typically I get it wrong 100% of the time, i.e. I was in the right orientation but misaligned so it does not work, so I flip it, fails again, and then I swear and flip it a second time.
Just don't accidentally stick USB-C into a USB-A port. It will fit and it will short the port, causing the machine to crash. Speaking from experience...
Once when I boarded a flight I noticed one of those multi-country mains power sockets next to a 2-hole headphone socket. They were arranged and aligned in a way that made it obvious that a 2-prong headphone cable would fit in the power socket. I took a picture of it and put it on Facebook before taking off.
After a nap I actually did put on headphones and plug them into the power socket by mistake. Luckily nothing happened.
I think most people in the US have stuck a finger between the two completely uninsulated prongs of a plug and got a shock, usually during childhood. They usually only do it once.
While you're at it, also don't accidentally plug a computer's Ethernet port into an rj45 wall plate that connects to an analogue pabx, it will fit and it will fry the NIC.
Don't put shit in the wrong hole is really one of the most basic lessons we should teach people in life.
On my computer, the USB-C port is at the back -- one time, I shorted the motherboard out due to trying to insert a USB-C cable without looking. Only did it once, but learned my lesson.
I use a docking station to help give me dual monitors on both Mac & Windows. Some monitors don't work in Mac. Maybe I need to get a new docking station.
Weirdly, the port on a cheap mechanical keyboard I have is USB-C but the cable they packaged is USB-C -> USB-A instead. They likely didn't package C->C because of the chicken and egg problem. Not everyone has enough Type-C ports.
Type-C hubs are annoyingly expensive, because they all assume you want all the USB 3.x speed and/or power delivery bells and whistles - but for connecting simple peripherals none of that is necessary.
I built my own based on a USB 2.0 hub IC, but I never got around to publishing the design files. I should get on that!
Even building a single prototype unit cost me about the same as a single off-the-shelf type-C hub, but of course, building subsequent units would be substantially cheaper.
> Type-C hubs are annoyingly expensive, because they all assume you want all the USB 3.x speed and/or power delivery bells and whistles - but for connecting simple peripherals none of that is necessary.
Meanwhile the most frequent complaint I read about USB-C is trickster/confusing cables or hubs because they don’t support everything
I was outraged when I couldn’t find a small, simple USB 2.0 USB-C hub for my Framework! (1)
1: the four USB-C ports it provides aren’t enough for my use; one is occupied by Apple’s USB-C DAC (the Framework’s 3.5mm port is unusably noisy with my Shure IEMs). Then add my charger, tethered iPhone, and a peripheral like a mouse or drawing tablet, and you can see why I need a hub.
P.S. if you did release the files and it was a reasonably affordable DIY project (e.g some soldering and assembly), I’d love that. Although I guess you’d need to buy a fair number of all the components to bring the price down.
> Type-C hubs are annoyingly expensive, because they all assume you want all the USB 3.x speed and/or power delivery bells and whistles - but for connecting simple peripherals none of that is necessary.
I've also noticed there are next to no usb-c hubs, apart from "docks" that usually do many more things are bigger. But, don't they have to provide the specced power to be "compliant"?
What I find annoying is that even "higher end" docks don't have many usb-c ports. I'm typing this through a HP dock that has a big-ass power adaptor and is quite big and heavy itself (has a huge heatsink), yet it still provides only one usb-c port. At least it seems to implement PD (I can charge a laptop through the downstream port), even though I think it only provides 15W.
Maybe it's a chicken and egg thing, but why do we still have usb-a keyboards and mice and thumb drives? wouldn't it make more sense for them all to be usb-c?
Having them be USB C would mean they could only be used on USB C ports (adapters from USB C socket to USB A plug are forbidden by the USB standard, because they would allow creating the forbidden USB A to USB A cable), while having them be USB A allows them to be used on both USB A ports and (with a simple passive adapter) USB C ports.
That’s a very good point. It doesn’t stop some manufacturers from still shipping the “forbidden” adapter type for just that use case, though.
I prefer USB-A for FIDO authenticators for that reason (and because the plug is more robust for USB-A and basically indestructible; C plugs can and do get bent on a keychain).
Ah, I should have been more precise: The (technically out of spec) "half-A" plug used by e.g. Yubikeys and some low-profile USB drives seems near indestructible to me. Regular A plugs can definitely be crushed.
As some anecdata, I work in facilities with hundreds of non-tech folks using USB-C Yubikeys and we see multiple bent connectors daily. Granted, our userbase isn’t known for treating electronics kindly…
In the early days of USB before flash drives were common, I was convinced such a cable would let me connect two PCs together to transfer data. Spent some time looking around in stores before a kind sales rep advised they did not exist.
> before a kind sales rep advised they did not exist.
Plot twist: they do exist, but not like you would expect. Unlike the forbidden USB A to USB A cable (which connects together the power supplies on both ends), there's a special debug-only USB A to USB A cable, which connects only the USB 3 pairs (and leaves both power and the USB 2 pair disconnected). Of course, that cable is useless unless you know how to put one of the devices in the special debug mode (and know which of the USB ports is the correct one, since AFAIK this debug mode usually works on only of the USB ports).
I have at least 10 computers in my house, and none of them have more than one usb-c port. More of them have zero. Two of those with a single usb-c are motherboards purchased in the last year or so.
If a mouse or keyboard or thumb drive expects to be used by an apple computer, or a phone, usb-c is the right answer. If it wants to be plugged into a PC, usb-a is a better choice.
USB-C instead of any flavor of USB-B makes a ton of sense, and everyone should adopt that, but USB-C instead of USB-A is a little soon for PC oriented products, IMHO. Wait a few years, or ship with an adapter.
Yeah, that's what I mean by "chicken and egg": We have all these usb A ports because that's what the peripherals expect, and we have usb-a peripherals because that's what we have ports for. My laptop has just one c port which I connect to a hub with a bunch of A ports. My desktop doesn't have any c ports at all. My car has one A port which connects to the phone for navigation (navigation using bluetooth doesn't work) and a whole bunch of c ports which are for charging only.
My 1996 $2000 Packard Bell was effectively unusable by 2003 or so. My 2003 or so upgraded machine couldn't play Youtube videos by 2012. My early 2013 $600 Lenovo laptop is still going fine today (though it helps that I don't game anymore).
Compatibility wasn’t what motivated people to switch away from the parallel port, 56k modem, nor the floppy disk.
Consider this exercise: The Nintendo Switch is the third best-selling console of all time. Walk me through how you would design it if the only port was USB-A.
Back in 1998 there were 4 or 5 main port types. And today there are still 4 or 5 main port types (with bluetooth as well). Compatibility was indeed the reason to switch to USB in the first place, as the universal serial bus made plug-and-play real. No reason not to have two USB port types, except device thinness.
The only issue the parallel port, 56k modem, and floppy disk share in common is throughput. This isn't a problem with USB-A compared to USB-C (until USB 4.0 becomes mainstream).
I'm not a tech nerd. I'm a lab biologist who just comments here. Multiple ports is my non-nerdy, non-rich use case.
My current car is almost 17 years old, and was bought used last year to replace the 20 year old car that I totaled. I certainly can't afford most cars with any USB ports, and wouldn't want them if I could.
Are car USB ports used for anything other than smart phones?
Car USB ports are generally only for smartphones, which is the #1 computing platform in the world.
That’s really the crux of my point. USB-C is the “winner” because it’s ubiquitous in the smartphone and tablet world (especially now with full adoption from Apple underway).
Cars are also a piece of technology that does a frat job representing the lowest common denominator of the average consumer’s relationship with technology. If your brand new $2,500 MacBook Pro doesn’t have a CD player, that doesn’t mean the CD is dead. It’s an expensive early adopter’s device. But if your brand new Toyota Corolla base model doesn’t have a CD player, that means it’s DEAD.
There’s also the answer to the question “what’s the most likely cable I have on me?” If you have an Android or Apple phone from the past 5 years you don’t have any rectangular USB-A cable with you in your travel bag.
I would also argue that the average person has very little practical use for USB for a lot of its data transfer capabilities anymore. The average person who owns a laptop probably never plugs in anything to the port besides things they are charging or maybe a mouse dongle.
It’s expected that your car (and most people’s cars) are older, but what I’m saying is that the fact that someone buying a new car doesn’t get USB-A pretty much shows us that it’s not long for this world if not dead already.
Sure, my desktop still has plenty of USB-A ports since space is not at a premium and nerdy custom builders demand them. But if you buy a desktop computer from Apple it doesn’t have any, and PC OEMs like HP and Dell won’t be far behind.
The only thing I’ve used the USB ports on my desktop for are mouse dongles and a fingerprint scanner. Basically, ~$20 disposable tech that would work perfectly fine as a USB-C version. My keyboard has already made the switch to USB-C and my mouse charges with USB-C as well, and I bought these items multiple years ago.
My mouse and keyboard are both usb-c and I wasn't specifically looking for usb-c when I ordered either of them. Logitech MX Master 3 and Keychron Q1. They are both relatively high end devices, but I don't think it's hard to find usb-c devices.
That said I do own lots of usb-a devices and will continue to own them for the foreseeable future. I would not purchase a laptop that was usb-c only today.
Is your MX Master the "mac" version? The reason I ask is because my 3s came with a USB-A dongle (which I prefer instead of Bluetooth). I've never used its charging cable, so I don't remember whether it was c-c or c-a. It also didn't have a C-A adapter provided, so if you want to use the dongle and only have usb-c ports available, you have to supply your own.
My wireless mouse has a usb-c port for charging only (doesn't have a wired mode). But its dongle is usb-a only and no adapter was provided. It's a rather recent and "high-end" model, too: an mx master 3s.
> I challenge the author to go find a wired keyboard or mouse that comes with a USB C plug. it’s possible, but not easy.
My Moonlander Mk1 does, it has C-to-C cable with an optional C-to-A adapter on one end. My mouse is type C, but it comes with C-to-A cable.
But, obviously, this is chicken-and-egg kind of a problem. No one will build a cheap mass market keyboard with a C-to-C cable for a market (desktop computer users) where type C connectors are nearly non-existent. Extra components (adapters or extra cables) won't be worth it. If the majority of desktops will shift to have majority of their ports of type C, you won't find a type A keyboard anymore. Just like you will have some difficulty finding a PS/2 keyboard today (sure they exist, but aren't exactly widespread anymore).
USB A was released in 1996, it's older than I suspect the majority of HN readers at this point. An A to C cable is entirely passive, so not exactly a big deal to get a cheap adapter.
Not sure I'd rely on keyboards as the standard bearer for 'not a relic' many of them still support PS/2 via passive adapter. That was announced in 1987 and is older than me.
Comparing technology to human lifetimes doesn't seem very relevant. Even not accounting for broad categories like "fire" or "language", we're still using individual technology from "long ago" like knives, forks, pen and paper, etc. It's fine to make improvements that keep backwards compatibility (more ergonomic scissor should be able to cut the same paper), but changing connector just because it's old is unwise.
The issue of type C is that it's trying to accommodate the entire spectrum of applications from very high bandwidth to very low cost. The range of possibilities has much increased since when Universal Serial Bus was devised, thus many recent solutions feel like they're bad at everything and good at nothing. Perhaps we should allow the specialization of type A as a cheap, reliable, slow, high power, connector, and save type C for only when high throughput is needed?
> ... but changing connector just because it's old is unwise
Well not because it's old, I'm a huge fan of my 1/8" headphone jack.
Type C is intentionally significantly more functional (not to mention the ergonomics of reversibility) but also fully backwards-compatible requiring only passive routing to get you a Type A adapter.
> The issue of type C is that it's trying to accommodate the entire spectrum of applications from very high bandwidth to very low cost.
That's up to the host. You can support just USB 2.0 with the same signals routed as a vanilla type A connector.
There's even super cheap USB-C receptacles that only have the relevant USB 2.0 pins routed out. Like this one [1].
There's really no reason I can think of not to use one.
I've implemented USB-C with PD and SS speeds before, so I know. I've even used if not that exact same connector, but at least a functionally same one from LCSC.
It's just that these reasons seem so inconsequential to me. There's stuff like type C needing two extra resistors even for USB 2.0. Being able to adapt between connectors is also BS in my opinion because you can convert anything between anything if you really wanted to. And if you only use USB HS speeds, you'll just waste connect lifetime of your expensive higher-specced cable. Sure, you can get 2.0 only type C cables, but why? I think there's no good reason to use USB-C besides high bandwidth purposes. Barrel jacks or supply power better. All our normal peripheral devices aren't consuming exponentially more bandwidth anytime soon.
I'm perfectly fine with higher bandwidth connectors, but don't force it on the majority of users who do not need the modernity and nice things. Have Type-C as a dedicated high bandwidth connector and don't force me to use it on my devices that don't need the high bandwidth.
Only because this is living rent-free in my head - a good wheel analogy would be Type C is rubber wheels and Type A is wooden wheels. Compatible, but nobody uses wood anymore.
I don't think that analogy works. On the female side, Type A is robust and Type C is fragile. I'd prefer to have my equipment with the more robust solution if at all possible, because fixing it is a real problem.
> calling USB A “legacy” and a “relic” is so misplaced. we all still own USB A devices.
All my client devices have detachable cables. All my host devices are USB-C and have been for a while, except for a) Xbox, b) RPis, c) Car.
a) I rarely plug anything into it except a dedicated charging cable or the odd Xbox-specialized devices.
b) for which client devices (if any) are never unplugged
c) A cable is plugged in and never leaves the port
For general-use client devices I either swapped cables for USB-C to uUSB-A or USB-B or had USB-C OOTB for recent devices, increasingly so on both ends.
I also recently moved from an iPhone 7 to an iPhone 13 Mini. If it wasn't for Apple refusing to do an iPhone 15 Mini I'd be USB-C all around.
> I challenge the author to go find a wired keyboard or mouse that comes with a USB-C plug.
Accepted: I've had both for over a year: Keychron K2, Keychron M1. Logitech has a lot of devices with USB-C client side.
The irony is that one of them came with a USB-A (host side) to USB-C (client side) cable. The other one was C-C with a "upgrade your computer connector" C-A adapter†.
> Then in 5 years
Huh. I've been going all in on USB-C since 2018, my strategy being to pick the new standard through and through and backport/polyfill USB-C on the USB-A host side† as needed, NOT the other way around.
It's absolutely ridiculous that any off-the-self device today has anything else than a USB-C port client-side (which is where most of the mess actually is with all the mini x micro x hispeed x A x B x HDMI x DP connectors). I'm not throwing away any pre-C device or cable, I upgrade existing cables to be USB-C††. If a cable fails I get a C-whatever replacement.
As far as I'm concerned USB-A/B is a relic. Folks cling onto it like they clung to VGA (then, and now HDMI), floppy or optical drives.
> calling USB A “legacy” and a “relic” is so misplaced
Calling established technologies "legacy" and "relic" despite them being widely adopted and used should be recognized as the manipulative intellectual dishonesty that it is.
I'm ready for it. My desktop has a half dozen usb-c adapters stuffed into various ports and hubs.
Usb-c cables are the most versatile. You can get all kinds of pigtails and adapters to turn them into anything else. Other connectors don't have that property of universality, because they don't have enough cables.
I2C or uart would require an additional wire, so that'd be cost-prohibitive. But I do agree that something like One-Wire would be better from a hobbyist perspective.
Although probably easy to implement in silicon, USB PD is an absolute nightmare to DIY. Pretty much your only option is to get a dedicated PHY like the FUSB302B to do the actual electronic part of PD comms for you.
Seems like it must not be that easy to implement, or it would already by in all the chips the way CANBus seems to be integrated in tons of stuff.
One-wire stuff is so cheap, and and they have EEPROMS meant for exactly this kind of electronic marking(I believe it's what power adapters did before USB), and it can be done with pure software on an MCU costing pennies.
Phone, tablet, laptop, tyre pump, MiFi 5G hotspot, VPN router, portable monitor... most of my devices are USB C, except for my car (2019 - recent rentals are USB C), desktop PC, keyboard and mouse.
I think it's great for travel, combined with an Anker 737 or similar battery and Anker 736 100W charger.
I specifically avoid buying anything without USB-C. Not only do I like having everything on the same connector, MicroUSB is often the least reliable part of a device aside from battery calendar aging.
Yup, I don't own a single device that uses USB-C either: laptops, tablets, phones, keyboards, mouses, flash drives, network storage devices, routers, wifi access points, printers, scanners, kindles, microcontroller boards, calculators, rechargeable battery chargers, wireless temperature monitors, etc. Everything is USB-A (to micro-B, sometimes mini-B).
Still mad at Apple for removing USB-A. I understand adding USB-C. Why remove them??
When buying an expensive (relatively) computer was a big deal in my house, I had a hard time convincing my dad about the iBook G3 which didn't come with a floppy drive.
I think Apple made a terrible mistake. But I am not worth $3 trillion, so who am I to argue? But I will piss into the wind anyway:
The biggest difference between USB-A and floppy/CD/DVD drive is the network effect. USB-A is an interface between 2 devices, so its usefulness is measured as an O(N^2). It allows all my laptops to connect to any of my peripherals. To replace USB-A, I would need to replace all my laptops and all my peripherals. A floppy drive, on the other hand, is an O(N) device for the most part. Its usefulness is mostly limited to the single device that it is installed. (Sure, floppy disks are shared between computers, but I would say that this is a less frequent use-case.)
The other difference between USB-A and floppy is that the USB-A is "good enough" for almost all use cases. My keyboard, mouse, flash drives, USB-ethernet adapters, all work perfectly fine with USB-A. In contrast, going from a floppy to a CD increased the capacity by 1000X. From CD to a flash drive, we got another factor of 10X to 100X. And much faster random access. A floppy became "NOT good enough" very quickly.
I see USB-A existing for the foreseeable future, the next 10-20 years, because of the network effect, because it is good enough for most things, and because it is slightly cheaper than USB-C.
Unless everything is fairly old, that must take some doing. Everything on my desk is USB C. Both keyboards, Logitech mouse, phone, dev kits / boards, both work and personal laptops (PD charging, personal only uses USB C). I’m getting used to the every cable is a double ended USB C life.
One criticism of Apple back in the Ive days was the lack of practicality. I like the fact that Apple relented on the MacBook Pros and they have an HDMI port.
I don’t want to have to use dongles unnecessarily.
> Apple fanboys/fangirls/fanothers: even the Mac Pro includes two legacy USB-A ports (admittedly it also has four Thunderbolt ports). Why is this relic of old tech cluttering the clean design of an Apple product in 2021?
This is naive. The chip hardware support to have 2 extra USB A ports is nothing compared to having two extra USB C/Thunderbolt ports and USB C/Thunderbolt is overkill for many situations.
I regularly wish my work MacBook Pro had a single A port. I understand my personal Air not having one—it’s lacking all ports but C—but it’s the one thing preventing my MBP from being as always-useful-entirely-on-its-own as the 2014 Pro I used to have.
Sure, but it still makes the pro slightly worse than it could be. One of the things that quickly convinced me I’d been computing wrong, the first time I was issued a MBP, was that I could just pick it up and walk off and be able to work for hours. No need to grab the power brick or an extra battery (did I remember to charge it?) in case I was away more than two hours, no need to take a mouse, since the trackpad was actually a viable input device beyond a few painful minutes. Enough ports I’d almost certainly not need anything else (I wasn’t doing network tech stuff anymore, so absent Ethernet didn’t hurt me)
The windows machines at work have A ports (and C). They have a single notable leg up in the MBPs, now, as far as pick-up-and-go capability. Of course they still lag in other areas, but it’s gone from pure win to “most of it’s better… except that one thing”.
I found the return of the HDMI and SD card reader so refreshing but also so puzzling.
On one hand that's what we asked for. On the other hand it was in the same wave as giving up on the touch bar, slowing (stopping ?) the evolution of the iPad, no touch support on the laptops when the design changes were hinting at it.
Basically it felt like they froze the hardware form factors in time to solly focus on the ARM transition and the Vision Pro. That's a good decision on many front, and also a sign that the mac is now in its "conservative" phase where change isn't to be expected for a very long time if ever.
Now that Panos is also gone from Microsoft, I wonder where innovation will happen on the laptop/desktop side. Asus and Lenovo ? If it doesn't, desktops will slowly fit into the mainframes' position, and laptops will be legacy/ultra niche tools.
Perhaps then it will truely be the year of the desktop for linux ?
> On one hand that's what we asked for. On the other hand it was in the same wave as giving up on the touch bar, slowing (stopping ?) the evolution of the iPad, no touch support on the laptops when the design changes were hinting at it.
Apple typically tries for a fixed design cycle - the 2016 MacBook Pro design changed in 2021, so you can hypothesize when the next significant revision.
Loud voices stated that pros hated the keyboard, hated the Touch Bar, hated having to use dongles to do certain tasks like give a presentation or pull in photos from their camera. People also waxed poetic about MagSafe.
Lo and behold, the next version changed the keyboard, dropped the Touch Bar, and added HDMI and SD card slots, and added back MagSafe as a charging option.
The iPad has had hardware revisions since then (it has gone from A15X to M2) but there has been some hold-up on rolling out new models. The oddity is that nobody reporting based on supply chain leaks has knowledge here.
My suspicion is that there was originally a launch planned for March 2023 of new Air, Pro, Mini, and two new Apple Pencil models. For some reason - all we got was a new base Pencil model this year, and that was only released last month.
I know of no design changes to laptop hardware that hinted there would be touch support. The software design changes in MacOS 11 and beyond have been around UX alignment with iOS, and more specifically iPadOS. Apple wants the 'mobile' team that works on iOS apps to see that there is a supported and intuitive way to adopt their codebase to iPad and Mac releases, rather than having the 'web' team wrap the code in Electron for Mac and letting iPad run in iPhone compatibility mode.
This is why iPadOS has been gaining Mac-like features (mouse/trackpad support, keyboard shortcuts, multitasking/multi-monitor enhancements to name a few larger ones)
> Basically it felt like they froze the hardware form factors in time to solly focus on the ARM transition and the Vision Pro.
The Pro models have a design expected to accommodate the M1 through M5. Several iPad models are all due for a design change, but for whatever reason thats gummed up.
I would expect if design resources are taken up by Vision Pro, they don't break or pause their iterative process - they just have less manpower to propose and implement changes in an iteration.
> Loud voices stated that pros hated the keyboard, hated the Touch Bar, hated having to use dongles to do certain tasks like give a presentation or pull in photos from their camera. People also waxed poetic about MagSafe.
Yes, if we compared the current laptop lineup to 2015's, the only real significant changes are USB C and the 14" notched screens. Internals radically changed as well as performance, battery life, and that's where Apple is keeping the focus (rightly so given the reaction to the current models, where the consensus seems to be to not touch anything anymore outside of the battery and the chips).
> The iPad has had hardware revisions since then (it has gone from A15X to M2)
Yes, same path as the mac where internal changes seem to be the priority. The biggest change for me was the introduction of the cantilever keyboard as an option, which as you point out went along with Mac-like features coming in the OS.
In contrast, in the same time span Microsoft introduced the Surface Studio line (the elusive 2+ desktop and the widely loved but crazy expensive laptop) and the Surface Pro line that directly answered the "What's a computer ?" question Apple was asking. Looking at the numbers [0] it seems they found a decent niche where the iPad has stagnated for so long.
I think Apple could have interesting ideas for the next iPads, but as you say, no leaks whatsoever at this point probably means it's at least a year down the line, and if it's a real big change the iteration process will need that much time (and they should take their time. A half baked prototype would be killed on the spot after such a long wait)
> This is naive. The chip hardware support to have 2 extra USB A ports is nothing compared to having two extra USB C/Thunderbolt ports and USB C/Thunderbolt is overkill for many situations.
Type C doesn't require anything more than USB 2.0 with the same signals routed out. There's no difference whatsoever. Type C is just a connector. Yes there will be more chip support if you decide to make the connector more fully-functional but that design choice is on the device manufacturer. They do not need to do that to have a Type C port.
Yeah, but having Type-C ports with different capabilities is wildly confusing to users. Imagine that Apple had mixed Type-C ports. Imagine the number of support calls from people that says 'doesn't work' when they try to plug their Studio Display in an USB 2.0 Type-C port. Or when the Studio Display works because they plugged it into a port with USB3 and DP-Alt, because the downstream hub doesn't work, because you need to hook it up with Thunderbolt.
In the end the only thing that is understandable to most users is when all the ports on a system provide the same capabilities (and probably Thunderbolt 4).
USB-C was designed for highly-integrated mobile devices. Motherboard vendors don't want to deal with power delivery and DisplayPort, and users will be confused when that stuff doesn't work.
When a USB-C port is out in space, rather than flat on a desk, C-to-A adapters create a lever arm that increases the risk of damage. Though this can be solved by using adapters with ~100mm of wire in the middle.
I haven't ever seen a controller that does the BPSK modulation required for A ports. I suspect the standard was defined, but everyone just decided to do signalling over the CC pins on USB-C and ignore the USB-A standard.
If you know of any controllers that implement the spec, I'm very interested in knowing part numbers! If for no other reason than as a historical curiosity.
Seems like anyone who would buy anything other than a laptop would be pretty tech savvy, unless they just bought it because of familiarity and habit thinking "Desktops are what we use for home stuff, I don't wanna mess with laptops I don't know much about".
I can't really think of why an average user would want one other than gaming, and PC gamers can likely figure out USB cables.
Motherboard vendors don't need to deal with PD and DisplayPort. USB-C will work just fine without them - it'll just behave like any regular old USB port.
Right, but if they do that then people will complain that their USB-C port isn’t working, or about how USB-C is so confusing because you never know what a port does.
They’ve got a choice between doing nothing and having a few people complain, or doing a bunch of work and spending a bunch of money and still having people complain. One of those is a lot easier.
> mechanical hard drive and a feeble 8 GB of RAM (is that even enough to run Windows by itself?)
Windows 10 runs acceptably on a Core 2 Duo with 4 GB of RAM - this was my son's gaming PC until a couple of months ago. (It did have an SSD, though - a mechanical hard drive would certainly have reduced the snappiness.)
It’s pretty crazy that an operating system needs that much at all. I mean, we all get used to these big numbers but 4GB is actually a lot of bits. A single GB can store more books than a human can read in their lifetime. Somehow, we have accepted that the most fundamental piece of software on a computer should require many lifetimes worth of books of RAM. We have come a long way from thinking we would never need more than 640k!
But you’re conflating data at rest vs data in memory.
A pdf for example can be very small but then take up considerably more memory to display an embedded image once it’s done decompressing for render. Similarly text is more expensive just by virtue of higher resolution displays.
What we ask of our machines has expanded greatly, and the immediacy with which people want things to load is more exacting too, so a lot of content is kept warm in memory.
I’m not saying 4GB is a healthy amount and I agree there’s likely room for optimization, but let’s not also act like there aren’t huge advances in what computers do to necessitate that either
I’m not sure I’m conflating anything. A bit is a bit. Some bits are faster than others but it’s all just bits in the end.
Yes, compressed content can take up more bits when uncompressed. Also, compression can’t reduce size beyond what information is actually there without losing that information somehow. Just because we are not good at working with compressed content and require a lot of RAM to deal with raw/uncompressed data doesn’t mean it’s not wasteful or even that it’s the only way to do it.
I’m glad you agree we have come a long way too. Perhaps as we collectively go further, we will find ways of accomplishing even more with fewer resources.
— written from a pocket sized computer with far more bits than the total number of humans that have ever existed
I used such a computer (4GB DDR3 ram and 2 GHz dual core Pentium) for some very basic work tasks on Windows 10 LTSC (the one without the bloat). It had Windows due to some weird hardware incompatibility, so I used it for about a month. The computer is used for browser with a couple of Google Spreadsheets opened tabs and a couple of messengers once in a while to reply to some messages.
It was almost unusable in that very scenario. I could handle a couple of tabs, but once I opened a couple of extra tabs (e.g. some search either through Google or any local shops) it literally hanged. I had to wait for it (to swap, I suppose) for a couple of minutes to unfreeze.
I went very angry over time and replaced the weird incompatible with Linux component (GPU) for another one and now it runs Fedora 39 with default Gnome 45 installed. It works perfectly well and it hangs only when I open relatively big number of tabs, 15 to 20, which is a lot for the use-case of that very machine. I thought of optimising the machine to run just swaywm (which eats like 300 MB compared to over 2GB of Gnome), but I never faced any issue for over a 3 months period.
So I would confirm that even 4 GB is plenty unless you need a big number of browser tabs opened. But not with Windows. Windows was usable on that machine if you don’t use browser heavily, but very very lightly.
The big upgrade in USB-C for mobile devices is power delivery; a secondary benefit is video output for laptops, enabling docking using a single cable instead of an old-fashioned dock.
PCs aren't in the power delivery game and don't really need an extra video output.
Meanwhile, USB 3 over a USB A socket is still able to transfer 500 MB/sec of data - I just did this earlier today, copying from an old M2 SSD in an enclosure to my new upgraded installed SSD. That's pretty quick.
USB C could double it, but how often do you need 1 GB/sec? Not many flash drives can deliver that outside of SSDs in enclosures.
Machines should have more C ports even if they have to share controller lanes--rarely would anyone be in a situation to saturate the system but being able to have multiple devices plugged in at once is useful.
I'd be perfectly happy with an internal USB C hub--but I have never seen such a thing. (I *do* have an internal USB 3 hub. Same issue--the convenience of multiple ports, I don't need the bandwidth of them having their own controller lanes.)
Not in my experience. The last few times I went to try to use one of my USB-C peripherals it was a pain. For example I wanted to use my portable external monitor with my laptop. Both are "USB-C" however the issue is that USB-C describes the physical connector and not much else. I already new my laptop supported DisplayPort Alt Mode and I knew that was what the display was expecting (rather than being USB display adapter). However, I then ended up digging through the box of USB-C cables testing them until the third cable I tried lit the screen up. This was the general experience with my Thunderbolt M.2 interface as well. I don't have much that takes uses PD but as I understand that's yet another dimension of permutations.
Without intimate knowledge of both devices /and/ the cable it's hard to say what any combination of "USB-C" parts will do. Even OEMs fail to get this right. I friend recently told me of buying Dell laptops which offered a dock as an option. Unfortunately, the dock expected Thunderbolt & DP MST while the laptop only supported USB3.
My personal opinion is that the relative lack of USB-C in a highly competitive, consumer market like DIY Motherboards is likely because even after 10 years the consumer demand is just not there. When judged the more lofty aspirations of USB-C that are being expressed here (replacing most if not all USB-A, HDMI, DP, Thunderbolt, and lower wattage power cables), I consider USB-C to be a failure.
The vast majority of keyboards and mice are USB-A, so you want at least two USB-A ports for those.
Even Apple recognizes this, which is why the desktop Mac's still have a couple of USB-A ports.
(And most of the rest are Bluetooth, not USB-C!)
USB-C has its merits, but I think they are bigger on mobile devices where you only have a limited number of ports and they have to serve multiple roles. On a desktop, it's certainly nice to have a couple of USB-C ports, especially if they're USB4, but you also have dedicated ports for video, audio, etc, so the versatility isn't quite as valuable.
I can’t speak for other people, but I feel like my life is a revolving cocktail of USB Type-A, Type-B, Micro, and Type-C. I can’t just cut and re-crimp my old 2001 Sony Memory Stick USB adapter (which still has drivers available for Linux) to support USB-C.
One thing that stuck out to me about the article is that the author didn’t talk much about their use cases with USB.
USB-A should be relegated to the rubbish-heap of poorly designed interfaces for the simple reason that it has no physical indication (e.g., RS-232C) or clear visual indicator for orientation, and you get it wrong 50% of the time. It's way beyond time the USB-A interface is eliminated. USB-C can't get here fast enough.
My MacBook pro only has USB-C ports, they work well for data, video out, as well as power (charging) and I am glad to be rid of the USB-A ports.
This said, USB-C needs to have its standards updated, and standardised. Eg all cables must support a minimum of USB 3.1 with power and data, with appropriate shielding. Stop yielding so many concessions. I'm already in a spot where I have a number of USB-C to C cable varieties that all look basically the same, but have very different characteristics. One cable basically refuses to charge anything. Another has no data capabilities. Another can carry decent power, but data is seemingly slower than USB 2.0. It's an absolute shitshow that manufacturers can ship something with USB-C ends and carrying USB-C markings that meets an arbitrary free for all standard.
For average consumers it's great. I think my phone is the only thing I own that could use 3.1(I assume, I've never looked because I do most everything wireless).
Almost everything (Including my 200Wh solar generator!) Will charge from 5v at 5W on a regular USB, and almost nothing really needs more than that, slow charging is quite often fine for phones and tablets.
Phones tell you if they slow charge, so it's just a matter of keeping the good cable plugged in the good adapter.
For the way most people use USB-C, as a power cable that can do data with a little extra work when needed, it's already great.
A big part of this is that a lot of manufacturers are just completely ignoring the standards.
The standards specify a rather limited set of cables, and it specifies clear ways to label them which make it extremely obvious to consumers what the cable is capable of. But manufacturers just... can't be bothered to actually follow the standard.
The main reason why there isn't one cable is that it has mutually-incompatible goals. A high-speed data cable needs expensive, thick, shielded data wires - and is limited to about 80 cm in length due to signal integrity issues. All completely fine for connecting a laptop to a docking station.
On the other hand, a smartphone charging cable needs to be cheap, long, and flexible - but it doesn't need to carry high-speed data. The aforementioned docking station cable would technically work, but it'd be $30 rather than $3 and provide a far worse user experience.
I think this is the big one. Having only fast cables is already possible. Just toss out all your unknown and slower USB-C cables, and buy a bunch of known good 30$ Thunderbolt 4 cables to replace them all. You don't need to force manufacturers to do anything.
But I'm sure the majority of users don't care about USB 4 or Thunderbolt on all their cables. They've probably never used USB-C for mass data transfers, it's a charging cable, or maybe a USB 2.0 data rate devices like a Playstation controller or a headphones adapter now that 3.5mm jack is dead. Even most of the enthusiasts here probably don't care about spending an extra 5$ to upgrade their keyboard's USB-C cable to USB 3. It's just a waste of money.
> USB-A should be relegated to the rubbish-heap of poorly designed interfaces for the simple reason that it has no physical indication (e.g., RS-232C) or clear visual indicator for orientation, and you get it wrong 50% of the time.
That's a crap connector implementation problem. If the connector is compliant with the spec, it will only go in one way. (Looking at you, Yubikey.)
I've seen this mentioned before, and I don't get it. Never ever have I inserted an USB-type A plug upside down. There have been instances where I had to fumble around to find the right port, but that never resulted in inserting the plug in the wrong way. How much force do you need to apply to even achieve that?
> Wouldn’t it make more sense for all of the USB ports on a new PC to be USB-C and then use adapters for legacy components?
It's annoying enough swapping wireless mouse adapter and keyboard plugs between my personal computer and my work computers multiple times per hour without also plugging and unplugging adapters.
Bluetooth would be even worse. But that raises the question that maybe we aren't getting a lot of USB-C ports because wireless is expected to leapfrog it to some extent?
I might be the minority here but I prefer USB-A. The connector feels more robust and I don't worry about damaging it. My keyboard, mouse, webcam, flash drives, etc. all use USB-A. A disadvantage of USB-C is that lint can get in the port and prevent a proper connection (this happens on my phone all the time). I believe that USB-A will be with us for a long time; the wisest thing at this point is to make sure that the latest USB protocols are supported over both physical ports. This was you can use USB-C on devices where small size is a priority (such as smartphones) and USB-A on devices where backwards compatibility/physical ruggedness are priorities.
I have mixed feelings about it. Technologically I definitely prefer USB-C, and the "reversible cable" and "plug fits either way" parts are really neat.
However, they do indeed feel quite a lot more fragile. USB-A is an absolute tank, and I regularly just haphazardly plug it in without paying much attention to it, knowing that I'm not going to damage it. With USB-C I'm always a bit careful about not putting too much strain on the connector - especially as most connectors are rather long and act like a lever!
I can totally see myself breaking off USB-C ports because I forget to unplug the cable to my docking station. With USB-A, I pretty much expect to break the cable first.
> With USB-A, I pretty much expect to break the cable first.
It might seem that way, but the port supposedly breaks more easily than the cable in USB-A, since the A port contains springs (which will eventually get worn out and can be bent).
Anecdotally, I've seen tons of broken A ports with exactly that failure in airplanes, buses, and other places with public USB charging ports that people don't treat particularly nicely.
The leverage of C plugs does seem scary, but I have yet to encounter a broken port – fingers crossed!
Less than an hour ago I set my backpack down on top of a usb-c cable plugged into the back seat usb-c port in my car. The cable broke at the plug, but the port is fine. I'm a little upset with myself because it was my only 5A rated usb-c cable.
1. USB-C is more technically complicated, especially when you want to create a host, and especially when you want to do anything faster than USB 2 speeds. Fully-integrated chips for USB-C are still quite rare, so you have to hook up a handful of different not-exactly-cheap chips to add a USB-C port. On the other hand, USB-A is pretty trivial and can be added at basically zero cost.
2. There's still a wide USB-A ecosystem out there. Having to use adapters suuuucks, so people want to have at least some USB-A ports in their system. Moreover, a lot of more-trivial peripherals feature USB-C ports rather than pigtails, so you can easily connect them to USB-A ports with A-to-C cables.
The balance will slowly shift towards USB-C, but it's not exactly surprising that USB-A is still quite common.
The main benefits vs USB 3.0 A jacks is it can also carry video and power. This makes a lot of sense for laptops, but much less for desktops. Thunderbolt is its own thing, and these wouldn't be thunderbolt ports. That leaves speed, but there aren't many applications for more than 10 Gbps. You're either going to use PCIe or Thunderbolt.
USB-C aside, I find that *TX motherboard manufacturers have been too unimaginative when it comes to I/O and haven't evolved for the past ~10y to serve growing demand in new and evolving segments.
My pet-peeve: If you want more than a single NIC in an AMD-based small form factor, your options are extremely limited. Even if you're open for importing and paying >$300 for just the board or going a couple of generations back. Meanwhile, you have a plethora of options in the exploding segment of NUC-like mini-PCs. There's almost nothing on the market in-between firmware-roulette Chinese mini-PCs and effectively ATX-sized breakout-rigs. Asrock RACK (with scarce availability) is the only exception I can think of over the past 5y. I don't get it.
You need a PCI card NIC anyway for when Realtek introduces another high throughput triggered bug in their driver and the motherboard NIC becomes useless.
If you're getting a motherboard with multiple NICs, it's probably not limited to lowest cost NICs, so Intel is on the table. (Although, I'm still not sure if they got their 2.5g NICs to work?)
Dual NIC boards with AMD sockets does seem like a niche unfulfilled, though. There's some options on the Intel side though, something like ASRock Z690M-ITX/ax might work if you compromise on CPUs.
The server space is quite nice with the ASRock Rack models: last month, I bought ROMED8-2T and got double 10G NIC and EPYC compatibility in ATX form factor. I also paid $100 extra for Intel NICs plus an USBC port. The motherboard cost 920 dollars though.
something that might be useful to you for that; you can get m.2 slot network adapters which you could use on (some) ITX boards. there's at least 1 & 10gbe ones available.
It sounds like you're at the intersection of "tiny", "multiple network ports", "multiple M.2 drives", and "dedicated gpu". I wouldn't be surprised if that's a rare combination.
I think a workstation with only one pcie slot is a bit rare?
Either way, if you're using an APU then that frees up an x16 PCIe slot, which on many motherboards can be adapted into 4 M.2 slots. That should get you plenty of networking.
Add 4- or 8-port GbE NIC to PCIe, add 64GB of RAM, add USB stick for router operating system, and you should be able to handle edge traffic for a small office.
What's your goal here??? Multiple NIC in ITX form factor, for what?
A lot of devices don't need what USB-C offers: USB-A is a concurrent, not legacy, standard. You want USB-C for high-power, high-transfer-speed connections. An incredible number of peripherals don't need either of those things, connecting them with USB-C just makes no sense.
"No sense" seems like a strong claim. USB-C is a better plug (reversible, durable). I don't know how much more expensive USB-C might be, but considering the number of cheapo devices that come with an unwanted cable with at least one (often 2) USB-C ends, I assume it's not all that high.
The main use I encounter where USB-A is actually better are dongles that don't stick out.
Can't say the USB-C is all that much of a better plug. Reversible: certainly convenient, but the tiny little stubby easily breakable plug? Strong minus. I've snapped a million micro-USB connectors (may it die as many deaths in favour of either real USB-A or USB=C), more USB-C connectors than I wish I had, but I can't remember ever snapping a USB-A connector.
Eep, I've had much better luck than you! My bigger concern for tugs would be whether the plug or the socket broke first, I think, though I don't know what fares better by that metric
Usb4 does not define "type-a" connectors, thus type-a by definition is not "concurrent" with type-c in the usb spec. It is deprecated/legacy (ie still in use but not supported by newer versions of the spec)
That's very much not how USB version numbers works. Each version replaces a previous version "within the same generation", while guaranteeing backward compatibility with USB 2.0 (at least for the foreseeable future, given that it's unlikely that devices that only need USB 2.0 features will ever disappear).
- The USB 3.2 standard replaced 3.1/3.0, but explicitly did not replace USB 2.0
- Similarly, USB 4 guarantees USB 3.2 and USB 2.0 compatibility.
It doesn't matter that USB 4 does not define a Type A connector for USB 4 connections: a USB 4 controller can accept Type A on circuitry that's designed to operate in USB 2.0 compatibility mode.
M2 SSDs can already saturate even a Thunderbolt port; then there's the alt-mode uses like DisplayPort, or the tunneling in usb4 that essentially gives thunderbolt3 functionality, such as running PCIe devices.
any device that doesnt need a 20gbps or higher link is better off connected to your motherboard via a usb-a to usb-c cable. the "a" connector has not been deprecated. in some ways it is the superior connector, higher mating cycles, less fragile, less likely to get ripped loose, much more torque required to bend, and so on. the "c" connector is more useful on the opposite end where you will be plugging in and out more frequently.
perhaps. but thats why you have the C at the other end because it doesnt make sense to be frequently plugging things in and out of the motherboard and and wearing down those connectors.
but i doubt you will get more cycles out of C in real life. that might be what the spec says but given the pitch of the pins on the C connector compared to the A, you have a world of greater tolerance to work with
If you don't frequently plug things into your mainboard, does it even matter?
> but i doubt you will get more cycles out of C in real life
You're free to doubt the designers of the USB specification and/or the manufacturer's compliance with the specification, but just logically, the part about having the springs in the plug, not the port, makes sense to me.
I've seen many broken USB-A ports in airplanes and other public charging ports with the spring connectors bent beyond recognition.
manufacturer's compliance with the specification has always been a total joke heh. i see what you're saying about the springs, but i shouldn't have brought mating cycles into the discussion. the side plugged into the motherboard should just be secure above all else. i can easily ruin any usb-c connector with just my thumb and index finger. the thickness of the A shell and its square profile prevent it from bending under torque pretty darn well.
furthermore, ive never even seen a usb-c connector at an airport or for any public use and i doubt i ever will. hell, even IEC can barely withstand that use case,i usually have to bend my prongs for the plug to stay in. usb-c not gonna make it 3 days.
> The three sizes of USB connectors are the default, or standard, format intended for desktop or portable equipment, the mini intended for mobile equipment, which was deprecated when it was replaced by the thinner micro size, all of which were deprecated in USB 3.2 in favor of Type-C.
I feel dumber after reading anything by Greenspun. Look at me, actually saying this out loud, wasting all your time with the sort of pointless comment that 5 minutes ago I'd have laughed at the very idea of posting. That's the power of the man's content. What a guy!
PS/2 ports are still there on high-end and "gamer" mobos.
This is also related to the fact that a lot of high-end keyboards/mouses are also PS/2.
They don't cost more than USB, are simpler in many ways, and if the mobo has dedicated ports for them, I think it make sense to plug the keyboard and mouse there to free up USB ports for other peripherals that are almost exclusively USB.
The initial roll out of USB mice was on 125Hz polling interval. The PS/2 mice were faster at first because they sent the signal immediately with no delay.
You can easily see the difference - with 125Hz it's impossible to draw a good circle with a mouse since it will always draw short straight lines
No matter what devices I use, USB seems to give me a bit error every few terabytes or so, over cheap cables >1ft. This makes me wonder: how do I find good (certified) cables, and why isn't there forward error correction in the USB protocol such that cheap cables simply work?
USB does have a specified maximum bit error rate, and presumably the CRC length is tuned accordingly.
What it probably does not have is a detectable error counter that marks a link as broken (e.g. in case of a bad/damaged cable, plug or controller) before the chance of an undetected error becomes unacceptably large, although it seems like a host would be able to implement that as an optional feature?
It is rated maximum 1 bit error per 10^12 bits, which makes the chance of enough errors within a single packet to break the CRC (or to cause more than 3 retries) astronomically small.
Presumably if it's a mass storage device with block-addressible storage then the host's fs driver should be able to (if it has its own file checksums) transparently identify the corruption and re-read the block, right? Or at least bubble up to the user and fail the operation instead of allowing silent data corruption.
Perhaps in case of storage devices (although it would be far less efficient to do it that way). But this approach doesn't apply to e.g. high speed industrial cameras. In any case, it's USB's job to transfer the data, so imho the responsibility lies there.
> Perhaps in case of storage devices (although it would be far less efficient to do it that way).
That's in fact how it works for USB bulk transfers: The host learns about the checksum error having occurred and it will retry until it passes.
That doesn't seem inefficient to me, given the low error rates involved (many flavors of Ethernet do the same, for example) – are you saying there should be FEC?
> But this approach doesn't apply to e.g. high speed industrial cameras.
These usually use isochronous transfers, where errors are indeed only detected (and reported), but no retransmission is attempted.
That's how it works, as far as I understand: USB indicates the error, and the host driver can retry if it makes sense – and for storage devices, it definitely does.
I just want at least 1 of both. For at least the next 10 years. I will still have USB-A peripherals I use daily to weekly until then. I would've paid $100+ extra for a USB-A port on this macbook.
Asus and Sony are still holdouts in the premium price range, Motorola and OnePlus in the budget range, and also a number of Chinese manufacturers I think
- incredibly durable; in the first week I had it, it slipped out of my pocket and was run over by a car, screen side down. No lasting damage aside from a few marks on tne glass
- headphone jack
- expandable storage
- removable battery
- dock-rechargable (which makes up for its lack of wireless charging)
- pretty clean android skin, cleaner even than my Pixel (which had a nonremovable google search box)
- has 3 programmable buttons, each with two options, so you can have hardware that launches your most used/time-sensitive apps. I have one mapped to Shazam, for example.
I bought a new phone a few months ago. Galaxy A14 5G. Of course, it's an extreme budget phone, but it works fine for me and - because there's less pressure to go for flatness - it has a 3.5mm port. In my experience, lots of budget phones still have them.
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 278 ms ] threadAlmost everything that has a usb-c connection can easily be connected with a c to a connector.
My laptop, on the other end, everything I use is usb-c, and everything that’s not is usb-c though a multi-port adapter.
the thing is, we could just have both! this isn’t some winner/loser scenario. the real question should be why these computers with enough bandwidth for 11+ connectors don’t at least split the difference with 6/5 of each. gives device manufacturers enough confidence that customers will be able to plug in the thing they bought, and gives consumers the ability to plug in anything and everything they need. then in 5 years when things have advanced we can start talking about entirely consolidating on USB C.
We are slowly getting there.
Very high end devices might have more than a single USB-C port (which is probably your case, given the "extreme" in the name), and these ports might even be Thunderbolt or USB4, but that's still rare. In my opinion, we are still in the USB-C equivalent of the "only two USB 2 ports, if you want more get a PCI add-on card" phase we had in the serial/parallel/PS2 to USB migration back in the day.
my current wireless mouse/wired keyboard have usb-c on the peripheral end but I still use usb-a to connect them to the computer
Ex. From my comment, GP is the comment by pynappo, starting with "i think the GP was talking... "
Similarly, you can have GGP for great-grand parent, etc.
OP refers either to the starter of the post or the top level comment.
USB-C erased that distinction in favor of a full duplex network connection between two hosts.
And USB-C is neither full-duplex (at least not for USB 2) nor host-to-host; there is a protocol negotiation and some devices can never act as hosts, although some can indeed assume both host and device roles.
Even in a “host-to-host connection”, only one side will act as the host.
In the same sense that A and B are variants of each other, sure.
Even though it's called micro-B, the design is closer to A, and micro supports both ends with basically the same plug. I would never refer to it as just "B". "B" means the square plug.
I wasn't being pedantic though. USB-B is in my experience used to refer to the square plug (commonly found in printers). Micro-USB seemed like a closer approximation to what I though that poster was referring to.
I can confirm, it's a journey. It's the same kind of journey than finding a hair trimmer that charges on USB C.
I see it more as makers being complacent and not giving a fuck though. There's no technical reasons for those to be USB A, and the USB C ones work great.
So yes USB A will be there for a while, and more often than not it's a symbolic middle finger to the buyer, a signal that a product should probably be avoided.
You have exceptionally strong opinions about USB A and C.
I kinda hate that we're stuck in dongle town for so long now. And going wireless brings in the charging issues. Computer makers are also to blame, but I think that ship has sailed.
maybe it’s the opposite, it’s a warm hug reassuring you that they’re not going to change things just because some of the cool kids are.
There's a good technical reason for keyboards and mice to still be USB A: adapters from USB A socket to USB C plug are allowed by the standard, but adapters from USB C socket to USB A plug are forbidden (because they would, together with a common USB C cable, allow creating the forbidden USB A to USB A cable). This means that USB A keyboards and mice can be used in both USB A ports and (with a simple passive adapter) USB C ports, while USB C keyboards and mice could be used only on USB C ports.
Therefore, until having enough free USB C ports in computers is common enough, using USB A ports (with an optional adapter to USB C on the box) on the keyboard or mouse makes sense. This is similar to how, during the transition from serial and PS/2 mice to USB mice, it was common for them to come with a adapter which allowed them to be used either on a USB port or (with the adapter) on a PS/2 port.
You don't say...
Not hard to do this regardless. Amazon sells A-to-A cables[0]; and Unicomp keyboards for example have a USB-A port in the back, and connect to PCs with a bundled A-to-A cable. Seems like preventing this is a lost cause.
[0] https://www.amazon.com/Monoprice-1-5ft-24AWG-Cable-Plated/dp...
For mice, having a hardwired cable probably still makes sense in terms of bulk and strain relief, but I suspect that wireless mice are also far more common.
Except that all of their plans already have USB A in them. They'd have to rework the plans. Then, rework the lines making them. Then they'd have 2 versions for a period of time. Someone in accounting and logistics would have to do more work.
Seems like a perfect time to bring that conversation to a halt with the "if it's not broke, don't fix it" line.
If a PC ships with mostly USB C ports. Well since the majority of accessories are A users are going to be frustrated when they need adapters/a hub to plug in anything because they don't have enough of the ports accessories actually use.
If accessories shift first then users are going to be frustrated when they need adapters or a hub to have enough ports to plug in their accessories.
Remember that the average user keeps a computer for 6 years and they keep accessories longer often throwing things out when they literally stop working or can't be made to work with their new device.
Furthermore even a slight increase in costs is problematic when you margins are fairly razor thing. It's a really hard sell for anyone to move forward.
Apple has a substantial advantage here wherein they have enough good will from their users, enough margin, and enough sway to simply upgrade and tell their users to buy adapters while neither losing profit nor users.
That being said being A is hardly a middle finger for the vast majority of devices which need neither more power/more speed than usb 3.2 2x1 can provide as we are talking about 10Gbps and 15W. The most common accessories are mouse,keyboard,sound,cameras,small storage, less commonly network adapters
We haven't yet found a compelling case for a beefy connection but surely there is right.
High end video capture, high end storage, displays, hubs that serve many fast devices, 10Gbps Ethernet.
None as common as the previously listed and not fun to get working when not every port supports high power, higher speed, or optional features nor every cord. Using such features feels like the plug and pray of the early 90s whereas plugging in a DisplayPort monitor or a standard stereo jack speaker system is as boring as plugging in a toaster.
Many common power plugs were standardized 50-100 years ago. Compared to them, even USB-A is still new. If all you need is power delivery, there is little reason to switch to yet another plug type, which only exists because of unrelated requirements in other industries.
But I'd think that the budget, off-the-shelf keyboards would be USB A.
When it comes to the entire ecosystem, a $5 bargain-bin noname OEM keyboard with permanently-attached cable is more representative - and those definitely don't come with USB-C yet. That would probably add a few cents to their BOM, so it simply isn't worth it yet.
Throwing away a perfectly good device because the cable is kaputz exacerbates our e-waste problem
> I challenge the author to go find a wired keyboard or mouse that comes with a USB C plug. it’s possible, but not easy.
where they do specially call out keyboards
As for the ones that are sideways: the 'bottom' of the case is the bottom of the motherboard, so if you think of it that way it might still work for all but the top side ones.
I'm at a point in my life where I've just given up and figure that I'm only going to get it right 1/3rd of the time anyway: Nope, turn; nope, turn; yup.
Google is usually pretty good about their USB-C implementations.
Definitely not googles finest device.
https://global.discourse-cdn.com/boingboing/original/4X/9/6/...
After a nap I actually did put on headphones and plug them into the power socket by mistake. Luckily nothing happened.
As far as I understand, not all US power outlets have a residual current device.
So, no?
Don't put shit in the wrong hole is really one of the most basic lessons we should teach people in life.
https://www.pcgamer.com/youre-telling-me-we-could-have-had-r...
I built my own based on a USB 2.0 hub IC, but I never got around to publishing the design files. I should get on that!
Even building a single prototype unit cost me about the same as a single off-the-shelf type-C hub, but of course, building subsequent units would be substantially cheaper.
Meanwhile the most frequent complaint I read about USB-C is trickster/confusing cables or hubs because they don’t support everything
1: the four USB-C ports it provides aren’t enough for my use; one is occupied by Apple’s USB-C DAC (the Framework’s 3.5mm port is unusably noisy with my Shure IEMs). Then add my charger, tethered iPhone, and a peripheral like a mouse or drawing tablet, and you can see why I need a hub.
P.S. if you did release the files and it was a reasonably affordable DIY project (e.g some soldering and assembly), I’d love that. Although I guess you’d need to buy a fair number of all the components to bring the price down.
I've also noticed there are next to no usb-c hubs, apart from "docks" that usually do many more things are bigger. But, don't they have to provide the specced power to be "compliant"?
What I find annoying is that even "higher end" docks don't have many usb-c ports. I'm typing this through a HP dock that has a big-ass power adaptor and is quite big and heavy itself (has a huge heatsink), yet it still provides only one usb-c port. At least it seems to implement PD (I can charge a laptop through the downstream port), even though I think it only provides 15W.
I prefer USB-A for FIDO authenticators for that reason (and because the plug is more robust for USB-A and basically indestructible; C plugs can and do get bent on a keychain).
It’s have seen multiple crushed USB A connectors.
In the early days of USB before flash drives were common, I was convinced such a cable would let me connect two PCs together to transfer data. Spent some time looking around in stores before a kind sales rep advised they did not exist.
Plot twist: they do exist, but not like you would expect. Unlike the forbidden USB A to USB A cable (which connects together the power supplies on both ends), there's a special debug-only USB A to USB A cable, which connects only the USB 3 pairs (and leaves both power and the USB 2 pair disconnected). Of course, that cable is useless unless you know how to put one of the devices in the special debug mode (and know which of the USB ports is the correct one, since AFAIK this debug mode usually works on only of the USB ports).
If a mouse or keyboard or thumb drive expects to be used by an apple computer, or a phone, usb-c is the right answer. If it wants to be plugged into a PC, usb-a is a better choice.
USB-C instead of any flavor of USB-B makes a ton of sense, and everyone should adopt that, but USB-C instead of USB-A is a little soon for PC oriented products, IMHO. Wait a few years, or ship with an adapter.
If this were 2008 you would definitely call a parallel port, a 56k modem, or a floppy drive a relic even though you probably used one in 1998.
Consider this exercise: The Nintendo Switch is the third best-selling console of all time. Walk me through how you would design it if the only port was USB-A.
The only issue the parallel port, 56k modem, and floppy disk share in common is throughput. This isn't a problem with USB-A compared to USB-C (until USB 4.0 becomes mainstream).
Most of the USB user base doesn’t care about that nerdy stuff.
My current car is almost 17 years old, and was bought used last year to replace the 20 year old car that I totaled. I certainly can't afford most cars with any USB ports, and wouldn't want them if I could.
Are car USB ports used for anything other than smart phones?
That’s really the crux of my point. USB-C is the “winner” because it’s ubiquitous in the smartphone and tablet world (especially now with full adoption from Apple underway).
Cars are also a piece of technology that does a frat job representing the lowest common denominator of the average consumer’s relationship with technology. If your brand new $2,500 MacBook Pro doesn’t have a CD player, that doesn’t mean the CD is dead. It’s an expensive early adopter’s device. But if your brand new Toyota Corolla base model doesn’t have a CD player, that means it’s DEAD.
There’s also the answer to the question “what’s the most likely cable I have on me?” If you have an Android or Apple phone from the past 5 years you don’t have any rectangular USB-A cable with you in your travel bag.
I would also argue that the average person has very little practical use for USB for a lot of its data transfer capabilities anymore. The average person who owns a laptop probably never plugs in anything to the port besides things they are charging or maybe a mouse dongle.
It’s expected that your car (and most people’s cars) are older, but what I’m saying is that the fact that someone buying a new car doesn’t get USB-A pretty much shows us that it’s not long for this world if not dead already.
Sure, my desktop still has plenty of USB-A ports since space is not at a premium and nerdy custom builders demand them. But if you buy a desktop computer from Apple it doesn’t have any, and PC OEMs like HP and Dell won’t be far behind.
The only thing I’ve used the USB ports on my desktop for are mouse dongles and a fingerprint scanner. Basically, ~$20 disposable tech that would work perfectly fine as a USB-C version. My keyboard has already made the switch to USB-C and my mouse charges with USB-C as well, and I bought these items multiple years ago.
That said I do own lots of usb-a devices and will continue to own them for the foreseeable future. I would not purchase a laptop that was usb-c only today.
USB-C to charge it, but dongle is A now that you mention it. It stays plugged into the back of my monitor.
My Moonlander Mk1 does, it has C-to-C cable with an optional C-to-A adapter on one end. My mouse is type C, but it comes with C-to-A cable.
But, obviously, this is chicken-and-egg kind of a problem. No one will build a cheap mass market keyboard with a C-to-C cable for a market (desktop computer users) where type C connectors are nearly non-existent. Extra components (adapters or extra cables) won't be worth it. If the majority of desktops will shift to have majority of their ports of type C, you won't find a type A keyboard anymore. Just like you will have some difficulty finding a PS/2 keyboard today (sure they exist, but aren't exactly widespread anymore).
Not sure I'd rely on keyboards as the standard bearer for 'not a relic' many of them still support PS/2 via passive adapter. That was announced in 1987 and is older than me.
The issue of type C is that it's trying to accommodate the entire spectrum of applications from very high bandwidth to very low cost. The range of possibilities has much increased since when Universal Serial Bus was devised, thus many recent solutions feel like they're bad at everything and good at nothing. Perhaps we should allow the specialization of type A as a cheap, reliable, slow, high power, connector, and save type C for only when high throughput is needed?
Well not because it's old, I'm a huge fan of my 1/8" headphone jack.
Type C is intentionally significantly more functional (not to mention the ergonomics of reversibility) but also fully backwards-compatible requiring only passive routing to get you a Type A adapter.
> The issue of type C is that it's trying to accommodate the entire spectrum of applications from very high bandwidth to very low cost.
That's up to the host. You can support just USB 2.0 with the same signals routed as a vanilla type A connector.
There's even super cheap USB-C receptacles that only have the relevant USB 2.0 pins routed out. Like this one [1].
There's really no reason I can think of not to use one.
[1] https://www.digikey.ca/en/products/detail/gct/USB4125-GF-A/1...
It's just that these reasons seem so inconsequential to me. There's stuff like type C needing two extra resistors even for USB 2.0. Being able to adapt between connectors is also BS in my opinion because you can convert anything between anything if you really wanted to. And if you only use USB HS speeds, you'll just waste connect lifetime of your expensive higher-specced cable. Sure, you can get 2.0 only type C cables, but why? I think there's no good reason to use USB-C besides high bandwidth purposes. Barrel jacks or supply power better. All our normal peripheral devices aren't consuming exponentially more bandwidth anytime soon.
If you don’t need the bandwidth, good for you. The rest of us choose modernity and nice things like, USB-C hard drives, network adapters, etc…
USB-A is not a connector, it’s a whole spec. You can’t get the same performance out of that connector as you can a USB-C connector.
I just assumed there aren't enough lines/pins in a USB-A connector for it to work.
A quick search gives me https://www.tomshardware.com/news/usb-3-2-explained which supports that experience (USB-A is not listed under 20Gbps).
https://dcrwheels.co.uk/custom-wheelsets/building-with-woode...
"Ghisallo have been making rims since the 1940s"
So let’s see . . . I have the following in my house, most are at least 2 years old and all are USB-C :
MacBook Air
MX3 mouse
Keychron keyboard
iPhone 15
iPad Air
Xbox controllers (several)
LG 4K monitor
Racer Headphones
Rode VideoMic Go II
Pebble V2 speakers
GoPro 11
Chromebook laptop
All my client devices have detachable cables. All my host devices are USB-C and have been for a while, except for a) Xbox, b) RPis, c) Car.
a) I rarely plug anything into it except a dedicated charging cable or the odd Xbox-specialized devices.
b) for which client devices (if any) are never unplugged
c) A cable is plugged in and never leaves the port
For general-use client devices I either swapped cables for USB-C to uUSB-A or USB-B or had USB-C OOTB for recent devices, increasingly so on both ends.
I also recently moved from an iPhone 7 to an iPhone 13 Mini. If it wasn't for Apple refusing to do an iPhone 15 Mini I'd be USB-C all around.
> I challenge the author to go find a wired keyboard or mouse that comes with a USB-C plug.
Accepted: I've had both for over a year: Keychron K2, Keychron M1. Logitech has a lot of devices with USB-C client side.
The irony is that one of them came with a USB-A (host side) to USB-C (client side) cable. The other one was C-C with a "upgrade your computer connector" C-A adapter†.
> Then in 5 years
Huh. I've been going all in on USB-C since 2018, my strategy being to pick the new standard through and through and backport/polyfill USB-C on the USB-A host side† as needed, NOT the other way around.
It's absolutely ridiculous that any off-the-self device today has anything else than a USB-C port client-side (which is where most of the mess actually is with all the mini x micro x hispeed x A x B x HDMI x DP connectors). I'm not throwing away any pre-C device or cable, I upgrade existing cables to be USB-C††. If a cable fails I get a C-whatever replacement.
As far as I'm concerned USB-A/B is a relic. Folks cling onto it like they clung to VGA (then, and now HDMI), floppy or optical drives.
† Upgrade the host port by leaving this permanently in the host device port: https://www.amazon.com/UGREEN-Adapter-Female-Converter-Charg...
†† Upgrade the cable by leaving this on the cable: https://www.amazon.com/UGREEN-Adapter-Thunderbolt-Compatible...
Not the author, but all my Logitech keyboards have USB-C.
Calling established technologies "legacy" and "relic" despite them being widely adopted and used should be recognized as the manipulative intellectual dishonesty that it is.
Usb-c cables are the most versatile. You can get all kinds of pigtails and adapters to turn them into anything else. Other connectors don't have that property of universality, because they don't have enough cables.
Plus, "active cable" is close enough to an oxymoron to make me afraid we overreached.
(I do like that a small pocket kit with an USB C cable and a couple of adapters seems to cover most needs.)
Hobby level stuff would be a lot simpler if any old microcontroller could talk to a PPS supply, interrogate cables, etc.
Although probably easy to implement in silicon, USB PD is an absolute nightmare to DIY. Pretty much your only option is to get a dedicated PHY like the FUSB302B to do the actual electronic part of PD comms for you.
One-wire stuff is so cheap, and and they have EEPROMS meant for exactly this kind of electronic marking(I believe it's what power adapters did before USB), and it can be done with pure software on an MCU costing pennies.
Go look at phone charging cables which you might want to plug in to your laptop and see that C-C is more common than C-A now.
I think it's great for travel, combined with an Anker 737 or similar battery and Anker 736 100W charger.
Still mad at Apple for removing USB-A. I understand adding USB-C. Why remove them??
Apple has been at it since the dawn of time.
The biggest difference between USB-A and floppy/CD/DVD drive is the network effect. USB-A is an interface between 2 devices, so its usefulness is measured as an O(N^2). It allows all my laptops to connect to any of my peripherals. To replace USB-A, I would need to replace all my laptops and all my peripherals. A floppy drive, on the other hand, is an O(N) device for the most part. Its usefulness is mostly limited to the single device that it is installed. (Sure, floppy disks are shared between computers, but I would say that this is a less frequent use-case.)
The other difference between USB-A and floppy is that the USB-A is "good enough" for almost all use cases. My keyboard, mouse, flash drives, USB-ethernet adapters, all work perfectly fine with USB-A. In contrast, going from a floppy to a CD increased the capacity by 1000X. From CD to a flash drive, we got another factor of 10X to 100X. And much faster random access. A floppy became "NOT good enough" very quickly.
I see USB-A existing for the foreseeable future, the next 10-20 years, because of the network effect, because it is good enough for most things, and because it is slightly cheaper than USB-C.
You can get those USB A-C plug adapters for $1-2 a pop. Stick one on the end of each peripheral cable, now they are all USB-C.
I don’t want to have to use dongles unnecessarily.
> Apple fanboys/fangirls/fanothers: even the Mac Pro includes two legacy USB-A ports (admittedly it also has four Thunderbolt ports). Why is this relic of old tech cluttering the clean design of an Apple product in 2021?
This is naive. The chip hardware support to have 2 extra USB A ports is nothing compared to having two extra USB C/Thunderbolt ports and USB C/Thunderbolt is overkill for many situations.
They are in the range of $10 Put in an expense report if IT doesn’t have one for you?
The windows machines at work have A ports (and C). They have a single notable leg up in the MBPs, now, as far as pick-up-and-go capability. Of course they still lag in other areas, but it’s gone from pure win to “most of it’s better… except that one thing”.
On one hand that's what we asked for. On the other hand it was in the same wave as giving up on the touch bar, slowing (stopping ?) the evolution of the iPad, no touch support on the laptops when the design changes were hinting at it.
Basically it felt like they froze the hardware form factors in time to solly focus on the ARM transition and the Vision Pro. That's a good decision on many front, and also a sign that the mac is now in its "conservative" phase where change isn't to be expected for a very long time if ever.
Now that Panos is also gone from Microsoft, I wonder where innovation will happen on the laptop/desktop side. Asus and Lenovo ? If it doesn't, desktops will slowly fit into the mainframes' position, and laptops will be legacy/ultra niche tools.
Perhaps then it will truely be the year of the desktop for linux ?
Apple typically tries for a fixed design cycle - the 2016 MacBook Pro design changed in 2021, so you can hypothesize when the next significant revision.
Loud voices stated that pros hated the keyboard, hated the Touch Bar, hated having to use dongles to do certain tasks like give a presentation or pull in photos from their camera. People also waxed poetic about MagSafe.
Lo and behold, the next version changed the keyboard, dropped the Touch Bar, and added HDMI and SD card slots, and added back MagSafe as a charging option.
The iPad has had hardware revisions since then (it has gone from A15X to M2) but there has been some hold-up on rolling out new models. The oddity is that nobody reporting based on supply chain leaks has knowledge here.
My suspicion is that there was originally a launch planned for March 2023 of new Air, Pro, Mini, and two new Apple Pencil models. For some reason - all we got was a new base Pencil model this year, and that was only released last month.
I know of no design changes to laptop hardware that hinted there would be touch support. The software design changes in MacOS 11 and beyond have been around UX alignment with iOS, and more specifically iPadOS. Apple wants the 'mobile' team that works on iOS apps to see that there is a supported and intuitive way to adopt their codebase to iPad and Mac releases, rather than having the 'web' team wrap the code in Electron for Mac and letting iPad run in iPhone compatibility mode.
This is why iPadOS has been gaining Mac-like features (mouse/trackpad support, keyboard shortcuts, multitasking/multi-monitor enhancements to name a few larger ones)
> Basically it felt like they froze the hardware form factors in time to solly focus on the ARM transition and the Vision Pro.
The Pro models have a design expected to accommodate the M1 through M5. Several iPad models are all due for a design change, but for whatever reason thats gummed up.
I would expect if design resources are taken up by Vision Pro, they don't break or pause their iterative process - they just have less manpower to propose and implement changes in an iteration.
Yes, if we compared the current laptop lineup to 2015's, the only real significant changes are USB C and the 14" notched screens. Internals radically changed as well as performance, battery life, and that's where Apple is keeping the focus (rightly so given the reaction to the current models, where the consensus seems to be to not touch anything anymore outside of the battery and the chips).
> The iPad has had hardware revisions since then (it has gone from A15X to M2)
Yes, same path as the mac where internal changes seem to be the priority. The biggest change for me was the introduction of the cantilever keyboard as an option, which as you point out went along with Mac-like features coming in the OS.
In contrast, in the same time span Microsoft introduced the Surface Studio line (the elusive 2+ desktop and the widely loved but crazy expensive laptop) and the Surface Pro line that directly answered the "What's a computer ?" question Apple was asking. Looking at the numbers [0] it seems they found a decent niche where the iPad has stagnated for so long.
I think Apple could have interesting ideas for the next iPads, but as you say, no leaks whatsoever at this point probably means it's at least a year down the line, and if it's a real big change the iteration process will need that much time (and they should take their time. A half baked prototype would be killed on the spot after such a long wait)
[0] https://www.windowscentral.com/hardware/laptops/microsoft-su...
Type C doesn't require anything more than USB 2.0 with the same signals routed out. There's no difference whatsoever. Type C is just a connector. Yes there will be more chip support if you decide to make the connector more fully-functional but that design choice is on the device manufacturer. They do not need to do that to have a Type C port.
In the end the only thing that is understandable to most users is when all the ports on a system provide the same capabilities (and probably Thunderbolt 4).
They actually do :) they don't all have the same capabilities. Some are Thunderbolt, some aren't.
USB4 goes some way to addressing this concern though, since anything marked USB4 has to be fully-functional.
When a USB-C port is out in space, rather than flat on a desk, C-to-A adapters create a lever arm that increases the risk of damage. Though this can be solved by using adapters with ~100mm of wire in the middle.
Meanwhile USB C goes up to 240W. You're probably never going to get that directly out of a motherboard.
False. USB-BC allows up to 1.5A, or 15W and doesn't require usb-c
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USB_hardware#USB_battery_charg...
If you know of any controllers that implement the spec, I'm very interested in knowing part numbers! If for no other reason than as a historical curiosity.
I can't really think of why an average user would want one other than gaming, and PC gamers can likely figure out USB cables.
In other words, it costs more.
[1] https://richardg867.wordpress.com/2020/02/29/usb-c-done-chea...
They’ve got a choice between doing nothing and having a few people complain, or doing a bunch of work and spending a bunch of money and still having people complain. One of those is a lot easier.
On Macs, USBC ports are used for both Thunderbolt and various USB protocols.
Windows 10 runs acceptably on a Core 2 Duo with 4 GB of RAM - this was my son's gaming PC until a couple of months ago. (It did have an SSD, though - a mechanical hard drive would certainly have reduced the snappiness.)
A pdf for example can be very small but then take up considerably more memory to display an embedded image once it’s done decompressing for render. Similarly text is more expensive just by virtue of higher resolution displays.
What we ask of our machines has expanded greatly, and the immediacy with which people want things to load is more exacting too, so a lot of content is kept warm in memory.
I’m not saying 4GB is a healthy amount and I agree there’s likely room for optimization, but let’s not also act like there aren’t huge advances in what computers do to necessitate that either
Yes, compressed content can take up more bits when uncompressed. Also, compression can’t reduce size beyond what information is actually there without losing that information somehow. Just because we are not good at working with compressed content and require a lot of RAM to deal with raw/uncompressed data doesn’t mean it’s not wasteful or even that it’s the only way to do it.
I’m glad you agree we have come a long way too. Perhaps as we collectively go further, we will find ways of accomplishing even more with fewer resources.
— written from a pocket sized computer with far more bits than the total number of humans that have ever existed
It was almost unusable in that very scenario. I could handle a couple of tabs, but once I opened a couple of extra tabs (e.g. some search either through Google or any local shops) it literally hanged. I had to wait for it (to swap, I suppose) for a couple of minutes to unfreeze.
I went very angry over time and replaced the weird incompatible with Linux component (GPU) for another one and now it runs Fedora 39 with default Gnome 45 installed. It works perfectly well and it hangs only when I open relatively big number of tabs, 15 to 20, which is a lot for the use-case of that very machine. I thought of optimising the machine to run just swaywm (which eats like 300 MB compared to over 2GB of Gnome), but I never faced any issue for over a 3 months period.
So I would confirm that even 4 GB is plenty unless you need a big number of browser tabs opened. But not with Windows. Windows was usable on that machine if you don’t use browser heavily, but very very lightly.
PCs aren't in the power delivery game and don't really need an extra video output.
Meanwhile, USB 3 over a USB A socket is still able to transfer 500 MB/sec of data - I just did this earlier today, copying from an old M2 SSD in an enclosure to my new upgraded installed SSD. That's pretty quick.
USB C could double it, but how often do you need 1 GB/sec? Not many flash drives can deliver that outside of SSDs in enclosures.
Machines should have more C ports even if they have to share controller lanes--rarely would anyone be in a situation to saturate the system but being able to have multiple devices plugged in at once is useful.
I'd be perfectly happy with an internal USB C hub--but I have never seen such a thing. (I *do* have an internal USB 3 hub. Same issue--the convenience of multiple ports, I don't need the bandwidth of them having their own controller lanes.)
Not in my experience. The last few times I went to try to use one of my USB-C peripherals it was a pain. For example I wanted to use my portable external monitor with my laptop. Both are "USB-C" however the issue is that USB-C describes the physical connector and not much else. I already new my laptop supported DisplayPort Alt Mode and I knew that was what the display was expecting (rather than being USB display adapter). However, I then ended up digging through the box of USB-C cables testing them until the third cable I tried lit the screen up. This was the general experience with my Thunderbolt M.2 interface as well. I don't have much that takes uses PD but as I understand that's yet another dimension of permutations.
Without intimate knowledge of both devices /and/ the cable it's hard to say what any combination of "USB-C" parts will do. Even OEMs fail to get this right. I friend recently told me of buying Dell laptops which offered a dock as an option. Unfortunately, the dock expected Thunderbolt & DP MST while the laptop only supported USB3.
My personal opinion is that the relative lack of USB-C in a highly competitive, consumer market like DIY Motherboards is likely because even after 10 years the consumer demand is just not there. When judged the more lofty aspirations of USB-C that are being expressed here (replacing most if not all USB-A, HDMI, DP, Thunderbolt, and lower wattage power cables), I consider USB-C to be a failure.
Even Apple recognizes this, which is why the desktop Mac's still have a couple of USB-A ports.
(And most of the rest are Bluetooth, not USB-C!)
USB-C has its merits, but I think they are bigger on mobile devices where you only have a limited number of ports and they have to serve multiple roles. On a desktop, it's certainly nice to have a couple of USB-C ports, especially if they're USB4, but you also have dedicated ports for video, audio, etc, so the versatility isn't quite as valuable.
One thing that stuck out to me about the article is that the author didn’t talk much about their use cases with USB.
Yeah but you can put a $2 USB A-C adapter plug on the end of it and just leave it there
My MacBook pro only has USB-C ports, they work well for data, video out, as well as power (charging) and I am glad to be rid of the USB-A ports.
Almost everything (Including my 200Wh solar generator!) Will charge from 5v at 5W on a regular USB, and almost nothing really needs more than that, slow charging is quite often fine for phones and tablets.
Phones tell you if they slow charge, so it's just a matter of keeping the good cable plugged in the good adapter.
For the way most people use USB-C, as a power cable that can do data with a little extra work when needed, it's already great.
The standards specify a rather limited set of cables, and it specifies clear ways to label them which make it extremely obvious to consumers what the cable is capable of. But manufacturers just... can't be bothered to actually follow the standard.
The main reason why there isn't one cable is that it has mutually-incompatible goals. A high-speed data cable needs expensive, thick, shielded data wires - and is limited to about 80 cm in length due to signal integrity issues. All completely fine for connecting a laptop to a docking station.
On the other hand, a smartphone charging cable needs to be cheap, long, and flexible - but it doesn't need to carry high-speed data. The aforementioned docking station cable would technically work, but it'd be $30 rather than $3 and provide a far worse user experience.
I think this is the big one. Having only fast cables is already possible. Just toss out all your unknown and slower USB-C cables, and buy a bunch of known good 30$ Thunderbolt 4 cables to replace them all. You don't need to force manufacturers to do anything.
But I'm sure the majority of users don't care about USB 4 or Thunderbolt on all their cables. They've probably never used USB-C for mass data transfers, it's a charging cable, or maybe a USB 2.0 data rate devices like a Playstation controller or a headphones adapter now that 3.5mm jack is dead. Even most of the enthusiasts here probably don't care about spending an extra 5$ to upgrade their keyboard's USB-C cable to USB 3. It's just a waste of money.
That's a crap connector implementation problem. If the connector is compliant with the spec, it will only go in one way. (Looking at you, Yubikey.)
I've seen this mentioned before, and I don't get it. Never ever have I inserted an USB-type A plug upside down. There have been instances where I had to fumble around to find the right port, but that never resulted in inserting the plug in the wrong way. How much force do you need to apply to even achieve that?
It's annoying enough swapping wireless mouse adapter and keyboard plugs between my personal computer and my work computers multiple times per hour without also plugging and unplugging adapters.
Bluetooth would be even worse. But that raises the question that maybe we aren't getting a lot of USB-C ports because wireless is expected to leapfrog it to some extent?
However, they do indeed feel quite a lot more fragile. USB-A is an absolute tank, and I regularly just haphazardly plug it in without paying much attention to it, knowing that I'm not going to damage it. With USB-C I'm always a bit careful about not putting too much strain on the connector - especially as most connectors are rather long and act like a lever!
I can totally see myself breaking off USB-C ports because I forget to unplug the cable to my docking station. With USB-A, I pretty much expect to break the cable first.
It might seem that way, but the port supposedly breaks more easily than the cable in USB-A, since the A port contains springs (which will eventually get worn out and can be bent).
Anecdotally, I've seen tons of broken A ports with exactly that failure in airplanes, buses, and other places with public USB charging ports that people don't treat particularly nicely.
The leverage of C plugs does seem scary, but I have yet to encounter a broken port – fingers crossed!
1. USB-C is more technically complicated, especially when you want to create a host, and especially when you want to do anything faster than USB 2 speeds. Fully-integrated chips for USB-C are still quite rare, so you have to hook up a handful of different not-exactly-cheap chips to add a USB-C port. On the other hand, USB-A is pretty trivial and can be added at basically zero cost.
2. There's still a wide USB-A ecosystem out there. Having to use adapters suuuucks, so people want to have at least some USB-A ports in their system. Moreover, a lot of more-trivial peripherals feature USB-C ports rather than pigtails, so you can easily connect them to USB-A ports with A-to-C cables.
The balance will slowly shift towards USB-C, but it's not exactly surprising that USB-A is still quite common.
My pet-peeve: If you want more than a single NIC in an AMD-based small form factor, your options are extremely limited. Even if you're open for importing and paying >$300 for just the board or going a couple of generations back. Meanwhile, you have a plethora of options in the exploding segment of NUC-like mini-PCs. There's almost nothing on the market in-between firmware-roulette Chinese mini-PCs and effectively ATX-sized breakout-rigs. Asrock RACK (with scarce availability) is the only exception I can think of over the past 5y. I don't get it.
Dual NIC boards with AMD sockets does seem like a niche unfulfilled, though. There's some options on the Intel side though, something like ASRock Z690M-ITX/ax might work if you compromise on CPUs.
inb4: CPUs as well as commonly used chipsets have enough lanes, it's not that.
Either way, if you're using an APU then that frees up an x16 PCIe slot, which on many motherboards can be adapted into 4 M.2 slots. That should get you plenty of networking.
What's your goal here??? Multiple NIC in ITX form factor, for what?
The main use I encounter where USB-A is actually better are dongles that don't stick out.
- The USB 3.2 standard replaced 3.1/3.0, but explicitly did not replace USB 2.0
- Similarly, USB 4 guarantees USB 3.2 and USB 2.0 compatibility.
It doesn't matter that USB 4 does not define a Type A connector for USB 4 connections: a USB 4 controller can accept Type A on circuitry that's designed to operate in USB 2.0 compatibility mode.
High resolution displays at high frame rates
High speed storage
External GPUs
High speed networking
It could be anything from USB 2.0 up to USB 4/Thunderbolt 4.
It’s the other way around.
USB-C sockets are much more robust than their A counterparts, since the spring is in the plug for C, as opposed to in the socket for A.
but i doubt you will get more cycles out of C in real life. that might be what the spec says but given the pitch of the pins on the C connector compared to the A, you have a world of greater tolerance to work with
> but i doubt you will get more cycles out of C in real life
You're free to doubt the designers of the USB specification and/or the manufacturer's compliance with the specification, but just logically, the part about having the springs in the plug, not the port, makes sense to me.
I've seen many broken USB-A ports in airplanes and other public charging ports with the spring connectors bent beyond recognition.
I mean... usb 4 literally doesn't define a type-a connector (or type-b). Usb3.2 is the "best" a usb-a port is ever going to deliver.
So while it may still be popular and in-use, from the view of usb as a standard, it is deprecated: it's not present in the latest version.
Actually, it is:
> The three sizes of USB connectors are the default, or standard, format intended for desktop or portable equipment, the mini intended for mobile equipment, which was deprecated when it was replaced by the thinner micro size, all of which were deprecated in USB 3.2 in favor of Type-C.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/USB_hardware#Connectors
This is also related to the fact that a lot of high-end keyboards/mouses are also PS/2.
They don't cost more than USB, are simpler in many ways, and if the mobo has dedicated ports for them, I think it make sense to plug the keyboard and mouse there to free up USB ports for other peripherals that are almost exclusively USB.
The link below has several outlined though I can’t speak to their veracity or relevance anymore
https://superuser.com/questions/341215/is-there-a-distinct-a...
You can easily see the difference - with 125Hz it's impossible to draw a good circle with a mouse since it will always draw short straight lines
What it probably does not have is a detectable error counter that marks a link as broken (e.g. in case of a bad/damaged cable, plug or controller) before the chance of an undetected error becomes unacceptably large, although it seems like a host would be able to implement that as an optional feature?
That's in fact how it works for USB bulk transfers: The host learns about the checksum error having occurred and it will retry until it passes.
That doesn't seem inefficient to me, given the low error rates involved (many flavors of Ethernet do the same, for example) – are you saying there should be FEC?
> But this approach doesn't apply to e.g. high speed industrial cameras.
These usually use isochronous transfers, where errors are indeed only detected (and reported), but no retransmission is attempted.
That said, a lot of new gear is USB-C only
Pros:
- incredibly durable; in the first week I had it, it slipped out of my pocket and was run over by a car, screen side down. No lasting damage aside from a few marks on tne glass
- headphone jack
- expandable storage
- removable battery
- dock-rechargable (which makes up for its lack of wireless charging)
- pretty clean android skin, cleaner even than my Pixel (which had a nonremovable google search box)
- has 3 programmable buttons, each with two options, so you can have hardware that launches your most used/time-sensitive apps. I have one mapped to Shazam, for example.
Cons:
- pretty big
- cant remove some samsung apps
- not a great camera or flashlight
Overall i would definitely buy another!