SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
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: 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.)