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A tweet posted shortly after Apple's recent Macbook launch event underlined the absurdity: Apple now sells 17 different types of dongle.
In its ever-escalating war against connectivity ports, Apple's latest computers do away with the SD card port, a full-size USB port, and the HDMI port.
Instead, you'll need a dongle to convert those "legacy" connectors, as Apple put it on Friday, into the new, smaller USB-C port.
"We recognize that many users, especially pros, rely on legacy connectors to get work done today and they face a transition," the company said in a statement, without acknowledging that Apple's newest iPhone, released just last month, is one such "legacy" device - without a dongle (or a different cable, sold separately), you can't connect Apple's new smartphone to Apple's new laptop.
"We want to help them move to the latest technology and peripherals, as well as accelerate the growth of this new ecosystem."
That help will be a decent discount on the price of the dongles - it calls them adapters - until the end of this year.
How long before they release new dongles that must be individually charged?
(Score: 4, Insightful) by SomeGuy on Tuesday November 08 2016, @04:31PM
USB is considered "legacy" already?
>"We want to help them move to the latest technology and peripherals, as well as accelerate the growth of this new ecosystem."
Translation: We want to help our pocketbook by changing everything around for no good reason and look like fancy hipsters while doing so.
Fuck you, Apple. I'll be hunting down REAL computers with parallel ports, serial, real Floppy Disk Controllers, PS/2 ports, and proper VGA ports until the day I die. Because your new-fangled stuff is not as great as you think it is.
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 08 2016, @04:59PM
It was hard to tell if you were trolling or not. Some ports legitimately get retired, but apple really is trying hard to do it the worst way possible.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 08 2016, @05:20PM
They'll have to pry my Centronics port out of my cold, dead hands!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 08 2016, @06:56PM
By definition shouldn't you have died from old age???
(Score: 2) by MostCynical on Tuesday November 08 2016, @10:44PM
His ps/2 keyboard in one hand, his other clutching a collection of cables for devices that died long ago...
"I guess once you start doubting, there's no end to it." -Batou, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 08 2016, @11:54PM
I'm still zipping around the net in my handy little Zip Drive. Only trouble is it has a manual memory assigner so most websites are a pain to navigate.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Scruffy Beard 2 on Tuesday November 08 2016, @06:33PM
When things get retired, the replacement often lacks some functionality.
Parallel ports allow you to use the machine as a glorified micro-controller
Serial ports just work (and can take advantage of interrupt handling). USB to serial adapters are often flakey. Not only is a a polled protocol (requiring a lot of CPU time), but some manufacturers have decided to 'brick' cheap USB-serial converters from competitors.
The floppy disk was relatively cheap, ubiquitous, and offered write protection. I have not really seen a good floppy replacement yet. SD cards come close, but include Copy Protection for Recordable Media, making them unreliable. CD-R comes close for write protection, but you are not able to remove that write protection to make small changes to an image.
For a while, I was looking for PS/2 mice instead of USB mice because I noticed that few of them are actually certified to actually work with the standard properly. This is an even bigger problem with USB type-C, where not following the standard can destroy your machine.
VGA supports longer cable runs than HDMI. Also lacks support for HDCP: an encryption standard designed to prevent the viewer from getting bit-perfect copies. At least initially, VGA supported higher resolutions than HDMI as well.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 08 2016, @06:59PM
Hey nice feedback! DMCA can choke and die, along with all other legislation making user's suffer for "profits".
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 09 2016, @01:26AM
Those legacy ports had a lot of limitations though.
I am not sad to see them go. Better that we converged on mostly one standard-- in this case, USB.
USB is pretty much plug and play, unlike the manual futzing with the old ports. (Limited bandwidth on those as well.)
(Score: 2, Interesting) by mechanicjay on Tuesday November 08 2016, @06:03PM
As someone who needs to re-cap his old P3 board just to write some 5 1/4 floppys, I'm with you.
I also now need to go buy a new PCI-Express card so I can get 2xRS232 and 1 Parallel port on my new box.
My VMS box beat up your Windows box.
(Score: 1) by RS3 on Tuesday November 08 2016, @07:53PM
Or try something like one of these:
http://www.ebay.com/itm/Targus-USB-Mobile-Port-Replicator-Ps-2-Parallel-Serial-USB-Connection-PA070-/162238761094/ [ebay.com]
http://www.ebay.com/itm/Belkin-Hi-Speed-USB-2-0-F5U216-USB-Parallel-Serial-VGA-Ethernet-Dock-Station-/331934300874/ [ebay.com]
(which I should get...)
(Score: 2) by mechanicjay on Wednesday November 09 2016, @06:21PM
By most accounts USB based RS232 is a complete crap-shoot -- lots of people having to drop their baud rate waaaay down to avoid dropping characters. The polling based operation of USB just doesn't play well, especially when trying to do Hardware based flow control.
My VMS box beat up your Windows box.