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Thunderbolt 3/USB-C Adapters, Cables, and Hubs for New MacBook Pro
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You mean USB-D? Samsung beat Apple to it: http://www.datapro.net/news/usb-type-d-connector-unveiled.html
That only proves the point though. The transition away from VGA was so easy and painless because compatibility both ways stuck around for so long that a lot of people didn't even notice it was happening until it was done.
Why does Apple want to cause maximum disruption to their customers for the sake of making a few bucks hawking cheesy adapters when there are clean and painless ways to transition tech?
And what is a 32 pin adapter? Making up stuff doesn't really help make you sound like you know what you're talking about.
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You say that like it's a good thing.
What transition away from VGA? The fact that VGA still lingers to this day on things like projectors is precisely why I had to buy an adaptor for my 2016, because it's the only ubiquitous port in my classrooms.
Sometimes clean breaks are needed in order to move on to better stuff. The transition may be painful at first but it's the fastest way to get to where we want to be. See: iPhone and Flash.
But VGA didn't just linger on in the classroom. Many PC and monitor manufactures stuck with it, too. Staying with VGA, until fairly recently, was the norm. Us Apple users are the exception.
No, I said that because someone else insinuated it was unnecessary to ditch USB-A for the thickness requirements of the device, which clearly isn't true (it's much too thin to accommodate USB-A). Whether or not it was a good tradeoff is a wholly separate question, but it was necessary for the design.
The latest notebooks around our office are Skylake-based HP Elitebooks. They STILL have a VGA port (along with a finicky USB-C port that doesn't work with MacBook chargers).
Exactly. It was unnecessary to ditch the USB-A for thickness requirements. They've made a device too thin to be useful because they're throwing away core functionality. It is also no longer comfortable to handle at the current thinness, and they've turned the keyboard to garbage to make it thinner. So you need an external keyboard to type anything longer than a short email.
They could make it thinner by removing the battery, keyboard/trackpad, and screen. I mean if you need external adapters anyway for just about everything you want to connect, what's the difference needing an external display and battery box too?
The idea is that USB-C/TB-3 will replace all other existing ports over time. Apple is trying to jumpstart the process by going all-in. The problem with including legacy ports is that inertia slows the adoption of the newer ports (e.g. look how long VGA hung around in the Windows world because notebook manufacturers were reluctant to drop it).
Same here. The model we were buying last year didn't have it built in, but had included an adapter which broke out to VGA and ethernet. The most recent models however are a little bigger and have VGA and ethernet built in again.
Someday that may well be true. Even if it is, Apple is still 100% wrong for selling a computer in 2017 that has nothing but ports nobody uses in 2017.
Newer ports still take time to adopt, all Apple is doing is forcing people to use dongles.
I disagree, but that's just me. It's crappy but more and more machines will go that way so the dongles exist and more and more will continue to come out and more and more devices will transition towards more USB C. It'll be an issue for maybe 18 months.
Plenty of people use USB-C devices in 2017. The port has been around for 2 years now.
Hopefully year 2023, we will get rid of all the legacy dongles and go with native type-c devices. no more dongle, no more adapter
Hopefully year 2023, we will get rid of all the legacy dongles and go with native type-c devices. no more dongle, no more adapter
By then, Apple will have moved onto the next port with no native devices and nothing but dongles.
And TB has been "around" for 6 years. Age doesn't make it widespread.
UsbC now seems to be the end of all about the cable connections, but within few years every connection in history has had something to improve on.
Pretty much every connection type for the last 30 years is still in some use. Only Apple has a problem with old connections, others don't mind having something like 1% of the devices volume used to ports that are used less often. Or they bring up 2 models, other has lots of connections and other model does not.
Apple's problem with connections is about this crazy obsession for thinness, even when it causes only problems. When it's combined with glued-on-no-expandability, we will have thin imac with no connections and lots of dongles and external devices, when we could have modular all-in-one with thickness of its leg (footprint no bigger than now), where you couls swap multiple storage bays at the back and different sets of connectors.
Just wondering if they have axed macPro already or are they making it thin also...
...and vastly more people still use USB-A peripherals. With a 2016 MBP I'd need to fish out a dongle every time someone handed me a USB stick at a meeting. There's only one USB-C to MiniDisplayPort dongle on the market and the reviews on Amazon are awful - so to connect my Apple 27" LED display I'd need a fugly USB-C->DisplayPort->MiniDisplayPort setup. There's one (1) USB-C dock that can actually charge a MacBook Pro - and Apple have gimped their USB-C DisplayPort support so it can't support dual displays. There's only 1 TB3 hub that you can actually buy - and that won't support charging. There's one 5k/TB3 display available - useless to me because it can't work with anything other than a 2016 MBP (even at reduced resolution) and I have multiple machines... and even that is lame-brained enough to only have USB-C ports on the back, so you still need a dongle to connect your keyboard and mouse.
Then you have the non-touchbar MBP with only 2 USB-C/TB3 ports... which would be fine if you didn't have to "waste" one of them for power (or buy a dock... or make that two docks because I'd need one at work as well and unplugging a dock and carrying it round kinda negates the purpose of a dock).
Sorry, but I'd like to get into USB-C/TB3 but, for the next 2-3 years, some so-called-by-Apple "legacy" connectors will be essential (and with soldered-in everything, that's probably going to be the lifespan of a new MBP).
Don't worry. More and more companies adopt certifications such as ISO 27001 banning the use of this kind of storage all together
It didn't take long for USB-A to supersede lots of legacy ports (parallel, serial, PS/2 on the PC side and ADB and SCSI on the Mac side). I think USB-C will last at least a decade and maybe 2 like USB-A did. It is superior to USB-A in just about every way possible.
Apple dropped legacy ports faster than everyone else back in 1998 when they released the iMac with no floppy and only USB-A ports. They got a lot of flak but were validated in the end. I think it is the same with USB-C. And they aren't the only ones releasing notebooks with only USB-C/TB-3 ports. HP has the Spectre. Asus and Acer have some as well.
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But the point is that Apple is one of the only companies, if not the only one who can move the market forward by making it a little inconvenient to use legacy devices. Most people won't need more than one or two adapters. Apple sells some for $19-$69 but there are plenty of cheaper alternatives on Amazon. The average user will buy what they need and move on. But when it comes time to buy a new flash drive or external SSD chances are they will look for a USB-C option. I'm guessing the iPhone 8 or 8s will come with a USB-C to Lightning cable standard. It will come down to Apple's assessment of USB-C adoption on the Windows side (most iPhones are sold to Windows users).
Then is not now.
ADB was a proprietary Apple port that locked Macs into mac-only keyboards, mice etc. SCSI locked Macs into expensive server-class disk drives, had ludicrously bulky cables and connectors and needed users to manually set device IDs and termination. Pre-USB Macs connected to printers using a standard, but unusual RS-422 serial connection sufficiently different from RS232 to require made-for-Mac printers. RS232 was slow and unreliable. The parallel port, again, used horribly bulky connectors and PCs were using an ugly (and non-mac compatible) kludge to use it for external drives and scanners. The situation was a hot mess and desperately needed fixing.
Now, however, we basically just have USB-A - which can support speeds up to USB 3.1g2 (many PC motherboards are now sporting red USB-A/3.1g2 ports) and is fast enough for any single disc drive and which enjoys ubiquitous cross-platform support - and TB2 - which can connect to MiniDisplayPort, DisplayPort, HDMI, DVI, VGA with a cable or adaptor that you probably already have. This is not remotely comparable to the mess that the iMac set out to fix in 1998.
In any case, USB-C/TB3 is heading for a world of "plug'n'pray" hurt, with a bewildering array of reasons why two devices with the same plug might not actually work together (USB-C vs. TB3, confusing USB-C/TB3 cable types and lengths, peripheral makers skimping and not including daisy-chain/charge ports, USB-C DisplayPort alt mode vs. DisplayPort-over-TB3 - with the latter pegged by Intel at DP 1.2a when 1.4 offers better support for 4/5k and gimped by Apple by not supporting multi-display MST on USB-C alt mode, docks that don't supply enough charging power for a Pro laptop, while pro/gaming displays are going to stick with HDMI/DisplayPort because its a pain combining TB3 data with the graphics output from a PCIe card).
They'd been phasing floppy drives out of their laptops for a while (the PowerBook G3 had a two neat bays that could take a floppy drive, a CD bay, zip drive or a battery - the floppy ended up being optional) and anyway, by then the floppy was virtually useless given the file sizes of the time. PCs held on to it for ages because the DOS boot process was built around floppies...
Also, the iMac was a new line. If Apple had just launched the non-touchbar MBP as a "Retina MacBook with 13" display" then I don't think we'd be having the same fuss.
Or, if we're looking at the history books, they could have done what they did with the launch of the Retina MacBook Pro in 2012 (which dropped Ethernet, FireWire and the optical drive): then, they also upgraded the previous design to the latest processors, USB3 etc. so those people not quite ready to make the jump had a valid option for another year or two.
OK, they've kept on the old model this time, but without any upgrades (and it was already a couple of years old), with most of the options removed and (at least where I live) put up the price.
Most people don't need more than a MacBook Air, a 12" rMB or the 2016 13" MacBook non-Pro (a nice product IMHO who's most serious design flaw is that the label should say "MacBook Air" or just "MacBook" ).
The problem is the executive toy known as the "MacBook Pro with Touchbar" which completely fails to meet the needs of power users with a shedload of different devices they need to connect, who wanted a desktop-replacement laptop.
Don't underestimate the benefits USB-C has for both users and manufacturers. Manufacturers have a hard time (which due to USB-C will get even harder) manufacturing accessories such as the docks because the competition here is extremely fierce. It is really hard to compete with China and with this universal port they don't have to anymore. And for most it is simple a matter of replacing the USB-A with USB-C. It is not a big overhaul that requires extensive testing.
For users you get a connector that simply fits no matter the orientation and by doing so it solves the biggest issue with USB for them. The fact that USB-C is also designed with powering devices in mind that also means charging quicker (which is very welcome on devices like iPads).
USB-A doesn't have these benefits. The fact that it is different from back than doesn't say anything about how well/bad the entire replacement process is going.
For users you get a connector that simply fits no matter the orientation and by doing so it solves the biggest issue with USB for them. The fact that USB-C is also designed with powering devices in mind that also means charging quicker (which is very welcome on devices like iPads).
USB-A doesn't have these benefits. The fact that it is different from back than doesn't say anything about how well/bad the entire replacement process is going.
What?
You think there isn't already a flood of cheap USB-C stuff from China?
I don't doubt that this will be great for mobile devices. The smaller connector is good for them, and much better than the horrible microUSB connector with its spooky quantum spin "rotate 3 times to plug in" thing.
Not so helpful with your MacBook Pro that needs 85W which it will only get from a handful of devices on the market if you have the correct cable with the invisible 'supports 85W charging' bit set in its ID chip.
But, hey, I want my next computer to have USB-C/TB3 - I just don't want it to only have USB-C/TB3!
Get an HP or Dell laptops, tons of them have both USB-A and TB3 and USB-C and all other ports