Two years ago when I bought a new car, I was disappointed to find out that it had only USB-A ports in it.
So - to parrot
@ignatius345 below - buy a $5 adapter then! Sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander...
Hint: cars don't come with Thunderbolt connections and I bet most don't supply 90W power to charge your laptop, so you're not going to get better performance out of USB-C.
Y'all this is no different than when they/PCs removed lightning, or 30 pin, or DVI, or the optical drive, or VGA, or FireWire, or floppy, or ps/2, or parallel port, or serial port, or ADB, or…
Nice comprehensive list of false equivalents. Most of those had become
very limiting and were already superseded by alternatives which were an order of magnitude faster/bigger/smaller.
Unless you pay through the nose for Thunderbolt peripherals, USB-C is just a different shape connector for USB 3.1 and DisplayPort - and the inconvenient truth is that USB 3.1 was already fast enough for most mainstream uses. Even 8 years later, only the fastest, most expensive SSDs actually take advantage of USB 3.1g2 (which could work over USB A if Apple allowed it) while Thunderbolt displays just tunnel DisplayPort (mostly) 1.2b - and TB possibly helped
delay the uptake of DP 1.4 because, for years after the introduction of TB, Intel's TB/USB-C chipsets didn't support it.
By the time Apple stopped making laptops with optical drives, I'd
already taken the drive out of my MacBook Pro and replaced it with a second hard drive (that could hold dozens of ripped DVDs if needed). It's not that optical drives were no longer
useful, but they certainly didn't justify being 20% of the size and weight of a laptop. You can't compare the downside of finding space for a tiny USB-A socket with a honking great, power hungry, vibration-making and unreliable optical drive.
VGA was pretty essential to anybody going to meetings with data projectors for long after Apple removed it - but that was
all it was good for, the picture quality and resolution was rubbish compared to HDMI or DP and the
connector was never going to fit in a MacBook Air, so dongles were unavoidable. Brilliantly, we were just getting to the stage where HDMI was becoming common in meeting rooms when Apple pulled
that from the MBP.
ISTR Apple had to do a U-turn on removing FireWire from the MacBook the first time round. Turns out people didn't want to throw away hard drives with loads of stuff on them or - especially - $1000+ pro audio interfaces where the only thing "better" about newer TB/USB3 models was a different plug. Actually, those interfaces are still perfectly good today (the frequency response of the Mk. 1 earhole hasn't changed) and I feel for those who are struggling to find USB-C to FireWire solutions. However, FireWire never saw mass adoption and it's other big "niche" - MiniDV cameras - was already firmly "legacy" by then with solid state HD cameras taking over. If you had to replace external hard drives - well, they wear out anyway, the newer ones were several times the capacity and 800Mbps FireWire didn't come close to USB 3's 5000Mbps.
ps/2 & parallel port never featured on Macs and are still around on some PCs today if you
really need them. A few people out there need serial ports, too - but (as with VGA) you have to draw the line somewhere.
ADB/Localtalk was a proprietary Apple interface (...and there was RS423 via MiniDin which might as well have been proprietary) that restricted the choice of Mac peripherals - within a year or so of Apple switching to USB-C it was
much easier to get mice, keyboards, printers, modems for Macs.
None of these remotely compare to the ubiquity USB-A
still has - 8 years after Apple tried to force USB-C it on the laptop market - especially when you realise that the majority of "USB-C" peripherals are still only talking USB 3.
Apple
did succeed in galvanising the original USB market with the iMac (the clue was everybody making their new USB peripherals out of translucent blue plastic) because it was a desperately needed solution - not a solution looking for a problem.
I have.
Several.
Now explain how I plug the adapter into a socket that
isn't there because Apple have cut the Mini Pro from 6 USB ports to 5 (two of which have been moved to the front so the adapter/cable has to stick out over the desk)
Part of the problem is that - until very recently - there was no all-USB-C alternative to the good old, cheap as chips, USB hub with a gazillion downstream USB A ports. There are now 4-port all-USB-C (not TB) hubs on the market (well, it looks like one product sold with various badges) but thats only been in the last year or two, but again we're talking about replacing perfectly good kit with (still) more expensive kit just for the sake of changing the connector, with no performance gain.
The easiest way to get extra USB ports is
still a USB-A hub (I've splashed out on an Element TB4 hub - but even
that give me 4 USB-A sockets and only 3 downstream USB-C) so it really doesn't make sense to start replacing USB B-to-A cables with B-to-C cables (including a couple of extra-long & right angle ones) until I can get something with a dozen USB-C ports.
They certainly seemed to be the catalyst for Apple changing- which we know they didn't want to for MFI related profit reasons.
The EU may have provided a nudge, and I'm sure MFI income was why the nudge was needed - but Lightning was coming to the end of its useful life, with iPad Pros needing to support Thunderbolt and 5k displays when Lightning only kinda-sorta supports USB 3.1g1, so we'd be looking at Lightning 2 anyway - interesting question as to whether it would be possible to double the number of connectors in a Lightning plug/socket and keep backwards compatibility
without losing the structural strength of a "solid" pin. Since Apple were heavily involved in the design of USB-C I rather suspect Lightning 2 would have looked a lot like USB-C...
The bizarre bit (probably because MFI) is that Apple pushed USB-C as the way forward for Macs while doubling down on Lightning for mobile devices (
and Mac peripherals!) - the one area where I'd agree that USB-C
is an unqualified improvement is as a mobile device/small peripheral connector (where microUSB was horrible, fast charging was a compatibility nightmare and Lightning was proprietary and expensive and needing dongles/hubs for I/O was unavoidable).
