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: 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.