I’m surprised they’ve been doing a well as they have. I just assumed they were going to immediately tank after he croaked.
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FireWire had a bunch of connector profiles but things worked consistently. FireWire is FireWire. If you plug a 400 cable into an 800 port, you’ll only get 400 speeds, but it’ll work all the same (and vise versa).
Certainly nothing like the current USB-C/Thunderbolt mess.
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I dealt with video cameras, scanners and drives which were inconsistent in various ways.
True that 400 to 800 works as advertised. I’ve currently got a firewire 800 hub connected to this iMac with both 400 and 800 drives attached to the hub.
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Its not the death of Jobs, it’s Apple’s special curse. They hit it out of the park with USB to replace ADB, but everything else they have tried since then in the realm of connectors has been a long series of missteps in which they kept backing the wrong horse:
Firewire, mini VGA, mini DVI, mini displayport, thunderbolt, usb-c. Plus a bugged implementation of USB 3.
Apple really badly wants to have a simple, universal connector standard for high speed data. Something better, faster, and more versatile than USB-2. While they’re at it, they also want a single simple video standard that doesnt take up lots of room on a tiny portable laptop. They keep getting bitten in the ass by half-baked standards (usb c), by veniality on the part of their chipset partner (intel with thunderbolt) and by lack of uptake by the rest of the PC industry (basically everything they’ve tried from Firewire on). USB-c is just the latest iteration of the curse.
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There’s always USB3 (which macs also have). The trouble with Thunderbolt is that it’s not cheap.
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…that is proprietary.
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The best trackpads I’ve found are on Chromebooks.
I just located for somebody a refurbished Thinkpad Carbon with an SSD and 8G of RAM for £600 after their son tried to persuade them to buy a Powerbook at twice the price. Lots of ports and boots in 10 seconds. Battery replaceable, spares readily available. I am actually kicking myself because I didn’t buy it for me. The point is, it has “proper” USB ports despite being little heaver than an MBA.
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Yeah, I’m currently eyeing up a new laptop - a second hand refurbished Thinkpad with pretty decent specs (Ivy Bridge i5, 8Gb RAM, 256Gb SSD) for a little under £350.
And that’s only because I want to run Android Studio and some specialist software. Otherwise I’d just buy a Chromebook. Yes, I could use dev mode and run Linux, but that’s sort of a hack. After careful consideration I decided a full laptop would be better.
I honestly can’t fathom why anyone would buy a new laptop right now. Not just from Apple, but from anyone. Thinkpads run forever, and when they do eventually die we strap them to tanks and naval destroyers as extra ablative armour. In terms of value for money, a second hand Thinkpad is incredibly hard to beat…
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There are in fact good reasons to buy a new Apple laptop and dislike USB-C, the primary of which is having to replace an older model which died and then needing to get various adapters and dongles to connect to things you own.
That happened to be my case where the battery of my 2011 MacBook Air very suddenly became obese at the end of 2016 and not having a laptop was not an option at the time. Buying hardware that at the time looked close to end of life when not that much more Yen got me the top model made no sense either. In my case I’m not complaining because a few USB A to C adapters is no big deal for me and I don’t use an external screen with the laptop but I can certainly see why someone who had other connectivity needs would feel upset.
Time and standards march on. Before this particular 2011 iMac goes to the grave, I already know I have to revamp my current rats nest of external devices, especially all the external storage for something more current. But it will cost me to do so and thats never fun.
Speaking of the above and “one connector to rule them all”, come to think of it I still have some weird SCSI adapters including one which goes from the oddball Motorola era PowerBook style to the hugest of SCSI connectors and a similar one to give that era PowerBook SCSI to Ethernet. Not to mention one scanner with the small size SCSI connector as well.
SCSI like Firewire was great as long as everything in the chain was just right.
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The issue is that USB-C is being used as a blanket term while it’s just a connector standard. USB-C is literally just the plug and the socket.
Somehow we have conflated USB-C and Thunderbolt 3.
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Yes! Still rocking my five year old X230T, with Kubuntu. Only thing I’ve had to do was replace the battery.
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“proprietarily incompatible” is almost a great band name, except for the abundance of syllables one (DJ, stadium announcer, divorce attorney) would have to say…
…it is a perfectly half written haiku, tho’:
Life flows best when all
is proprietarily
incompatible
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Obvious nonsense. If that were so they’d never have adopted USB -an intel thing - in the first place. As it was, their decision turned USB from “unsupported bus” into the huge thing it is.
USB-C is basically the non-Apple world response to “ooh look, lightning connectors go both ways “ and the speed of thunderbolt interfaces - another intel thing.
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In its laptop line Apple pursues standard interfaces and connections.
Rumor is they also pitched a lightning like connector to the USB consortium before they adopted lightning and were told nobody is interested in a thinner reversible connector (this was prior to USB-C’s existence)
Apple (and Google for that matter) both participated heavily in the USB-C design.
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Excuse me, everyone, but is there someone graphically and logically gifted amongst you who can turn Marco Arment’s lament into a flowchart? I don’t even… know where to take the turn.
And I might just have bought the first device in this houshold with USB-C connector.
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And they learned the lesson from it. Before that there was the proprietary ADB (which was much neater than other solutions, but still proprietary). Apple I think was the first really to adopt USB and Firewire, and again they reaped advantages.
Apple is not the dominant player in laptops and so have to maintain compatibility, even if “leading edge” compatibility. But in phones, where I believe they are dominant in the US market, they use proprietary connectors as another way (on top of iTunes, iMessage etc.) of increasing the cost of “switching”.
Really the strategy is simple to understand. Where you are not dominant make it easy to switch to you (laptops); where you are dominant make it hard to move away.
My wife’s tablet has USB-C. I have so far avoided it. Now all the USB cables in our house are colour coded, as I have chargers at convenient locations. It’s too easy to try to use the wrong one otherwise. Perhaps USB-C was designed as a micro-USB socket destructor.
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(spoiler: It’s because the Roku’s cable is special, and they decided to half ass the proprietary connector bit)
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Thanks for the warning. I will add some more toilet paper rolls to the cable drawer, and color-code the cable for sure.
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Sort of like being the number one finisher in the slowest heat.
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Apple isn’t the problem here… the problem is that the USB spec has become a hydra.
A $5 charging cable is not going to meet the spec for video.
There is no solution, because people will not pay $50 for a charging cable.
Oh, wait, we could go back to using separate connectors for different functions. That actually works.
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