Considering Microsoft finally added the x86 compatibility to Windows on ARM as soon as Apple launched M1 based Macs I don't think your comment will age very well. Slightly trolling here, sorry.
More seriously, the reason for dropping x86 is not Apple saying so but the fact that we've essentially hit the limits of Moore's law. You can't make transistors smaller than a couple nanometers. The only way to increase computing power is to marry all purpose processing cores with purpose-built cores that do heavy lif
I thought I had made it clear that my comment was tongue in cheek. Anyway. What I was referring to with my comment was this https://www.theregister.com/20... [theregister.com] Windows 10 on ARM didn't have an x86-64 emulation and it still doesn't except in preview. The timing could be coincidental but Apple announced Rosetta 2 and Microsoft realised they need to show the world they have already been working on the same thing, too.
You also make a lot of assumptions about me. I am not an Apple fanboy. I use Windows 10, Kubunt
There are a ton of brilliant developers at Microsoft. The entire team working on.NET Core is just one facet I think are brilliant. Where Microsoft typically falls on its sword is the conceptual vision and the management that is needed to get there. Windows RT...very smart to open up Windows to ARM processors, which is where the mobile world was headed. Dumb idea to wall it off from the rest of the Windows world. Instead, they should have dogpiled their hardware and software teams into solving the ARM/x86 d
It is happening. I'm seeing CPUs by Ampere Computing going to 80 cores. It is only a matter of time before ARM or RISC-V reach speed parity with at least the desktop line of CPUs, if not competing head to head with EPYC or Xeons.
On the TouchBar keyboards, the top left is always escape unless the application you are using specially asks for it to be something else (in which case it would not use the escape key).
So Apple never dropped the escape key, they simply age some apps the ability to re-map that area to something else (just as in other apps what esc does can change).
as a vim user with (until recently) one of those awful machines who suffered at work for several years: fuck you and the horse you rode in on.:)
Seriously though. They dropped the key and replaced it with a soft keyboard. There's a reason they didn't replace the entire keyboard with a soft keyboard because it sucks for regular use. The lack of an actual escape key was bad if you wanted to use it regularly.
as a vim user with (until recently) one of those awful machines
As a vim user who long ago mapped "jj" to I wouldn't have noticed, but I haven't used a Mac since the 90s so it's a moot point. I've never come across a need to type two consecutive "j"s in insert mode, so this mapping works great. I can switch from insert mode to normal mode without taking my fingers off the home row.
No, it's correct. Apple got rid of the escape key. As in an actual physical key. Yes, there was the touch bar, but that's not a physical key, but a soft keyboard. After much mocking and complaining, Apple later restored the physical escape key.
Around 2015-2016, Lenovo had a laptop which replaced the escape key and the function keys with a touch bar... which didn't work under Linux. They also remapped things like the "|" key to really oddball locations. I had to use one for a work laptop for a month or so... wound up using a USB keyboard with it, since it was such a pain to use.
Many computers still have legacy ports too, particularly PS2 ports as gamers think they offer lower latency. Many motherboards still have serial port headers too, often unpopulated but still...
The USB-C port is better, it's reversible, can support higher power charging, can support thunderbolt and displayport etc.
If you kept providing USB-A ports, then people would continue using them and peripheral manufacturers would continue producing devices for them. They would ignore the USB-C ports entirely.
It happened before, USB was around for several years, and was just "some weird port that we never use and dont know what its for"... Often motherboards would include USB headers on the board but they didn't even bother breaking them out to actual sockets on the outside of the case. Windows 95 lacked USB support initially, as did NT. I had several such boards back in the day. Everyone continued to use rs232, parallel ports, ps/2 mouse and keyboard etc.
Once Apple came out with the iMac that ONLY had USB ports, third parties stepped up and started providing USB devices. The same thing is happening today, there are now USB-C devices widely available and Apple users will generally prefer these devices due to the lack of dongle.
And how is this greedy? USB-C is an open standard, anyone is free to support it or produce devices for it. If anything it's the opposite, before the days of USB Apple used several proprietary ports, after the introduction of USB you could now use third party peripherals far more easily. It's the same today, you no longer need to buy an Apple charger - any USB-C charger will work if it provides enough power. USB-C becoming ubiquitous benefits everyone, not just Apple.
Not to split hairs but USB is absolutely not an open standard. You must pay a license for it, hence the reason there's a whole vendor ID in the protocol. Additionally, the USB logo is copyrighted and there's a fee if you want to include the logo on your device. Now does anyone enforce all of that? Not really.
Now if you take a USB header and do whatever you want with it and not slap the USB logo on it (which you might see for some hobby electronic kits that take USB-A to two pin 5v header for breadboard) you can do that. It's just when you want to interoperate with other USB devices and hubs that you cross that copyright and patent domain.
I've made a few "USB" products that were not certified, it's not at all uncommon, especially with industrial devices. For consumer stuff it's worth doing it legit, last time I checked it was $2000/year for membership which nets you the IDs and right to use the logo if you self-certify. Having said that I made consumer stuff without legit IDs as well...
The worst abuse I've ever seen was a cheap lamp my brother bought. It used USB A sockets to connect the 18V AC power supply to the lamp. The PSU side was a so
USB type A connectors are used for JVS arcade game controls, which are not compatible with USB. The connectors are just widely available, convenient, and tough.
If you kept providing USB-A ports, then people would continue using them and peripheral manufacturers would continue producing devices for them.
I mean, Apple dropped USB-A from the laptops 4 years ago and I still don't see the number of flashdrives and devices that are USB-A decreasing. Unfortunately the use of dongles with USB-A ports on them has just become the norm instead.
Windows 95 lacked USB support initially, as did NT. I had several such boards back in the day. Everyone continued to use rs232, parallel ports, ps/2 mouse and keyboard etc. Once Apple came out with the iMac that ONLY had USB ports, third parties stepped up and started providing USB devices.
Well, lets be fair here, USB didn't even exist when Windows 95 was released. It was brand new when Apple released the G3 iMac. That may well have helped speed up adoption a little, but with IBM, Intel, Microsoft, and several PC manufacturers being the creators of USB it was clear they intended it for PC use.
It's a bit of a myth that Apple spurred USB adoption. It was really a combination of things.
USB 1.1 made it viable for PCs by allowing the BIOS to support USB keyboards fairly easily, without the need for a full USB stack. 1.1 also introduced a much better test suite and clearer documentation, although to this day it's still a bit of a mess.
Around that time cheap chipsets for USB started to appear, both for the PC side and the peripheral side. In particular dual USB/PS2 keyboard and mouse controllers. Once cheap controllers were available it became possible to make cheap peripherals that were competitive with PS2 ones.
USB 2.0 added enough bandwidth for peripherals like drives and scanners and cameras.
USB 1.0 came out in January 1996, the iMac came out in August 1998. USB was more than 2 years old when the iMac was released. USB predates the release of NT4, which lacked support for it. Windows 95 OSR2.1 first had USB support in August 1997, a year before the iMac but more than a year after the first spec and supporting hardware was available. Microsoft were part of the group that initially started developing USB in 1994 whereas Apple were not. You'd have expected them to be shipping support a bit sooner t
The USB-C port is better, it's reversible, can support higher power charging, can support thunderbolt and displayport etc.
It's also more fragile and less commonly supported by random crap.
If you kept providing USB-A ports, then people would continue using them and peripheral manufacturers would continue producing devices for them. They would ignore the USB-C ports entirely.
I want a laptop not a crusade. My SO's Carbon X1 has a smattering of everything, A, C, headphones, HDMI, micro SD, micro SIM, even a min
USB-C is supposed to be the most robust USB connector so far, and in my experience is pretty durable. They changed the mechanical design to make the sockets extremely strong, much less prone to damage than USB-A.
USB-C is supposed to be the most robust USB connector so far, and in my experience is pretty durable. They changed the mechanical design to make the sockets extremely strong, much less prone to damage than USB-A.
I wonder how that will play out. Micro B was quite fragile. I don't think I've ever broken a full sized A socket. They're pretty big, there's a lot of meat in there and a ton of space between the pins, especially for version 1 and 2, which make up a good fraction of my peripherals.
I've seen a lot of broken A sockets, especially in public places like airports and cafes. It's usually the pins and the plastic carrier for them that are damaged.
The issue seems to be that they can be damaged by trying to force the connector in upside down or by objects poked in there.
The C sockets fix all that, and the metal housing is a little deeper relative to the pins to ensure they don't get bent when yanking on the cable.
Having all these ports only makes sense if you use all of them at the same time. Dongles are only a minor inconvenience when you're plugging something in anyway, what difference does a small dongle make when attached to the end of a long ethernet cable?
Need ethernet? you have one ethernet port, i have 4 USB-C ports which could let me attach 4 ethernet dongles if needed. Don't need ethernet? You have a redundant useless port that's just going to get clogged with dirt, i have USB-C ports that can be used for ot
If you want to use that many ports at the same time, then a docking station may be for you.
Sure dongles might be a minor inconvenience. I mean they make your thin, light, fancy laptop need a bag of ancillary crap. And it's one more thing to lose/forget going on travel. It's not like it's a, show stopper, but why pay extra for minor inconveniences? Thing is it's always apple users asking the audience for dongles at conferences because the conference system expects HDMI not USB-C and someone forgot their dong
It happened before, USB was around for several years, and was just "some weird port that we never use and dont know what its for"... Often motherboards would include USB headers on the board but they didn't even bother breaking them out to actual sockets on the outside of the case. Windows 95 lacked USB support initially, as did NT. I had several such boards back in the day. Everyone continued to use rs232, parallel ports, ps/2 mouse and keyboard etc.
So basically what you're saying is let the Mac users suffer while the industry slowly adopts change and then make the switch to USB-C when we're actually ready, just like USB?
I fully agree with you. All the more reason *not* to standardise on USB-C yet.
When USB came out, USB peripherals generally had a $30-$50 premium over RS-232 versions. USB floppies were $120 when you could pick up a regular internal version for about $25. I was shopping for a flatbed scanner, and I remember the parallel version was $100 while the USB version was $150. People didn't buy USB because it was hella expensive.
Same thing with SATA CD-ROMs. People continued to buy PATA CD drives for years after hard drives went to SATA, because CD-ROMs with SATA cost about $50 more than t
USB floppies were $120 when you could pick up a regular internal version for about $25..
Well could you pkeacy compare like with like ish, that is compare a usb floppy drive with an rs32/ paralell port floppy dive. My point here is that you compared something for internal mounting in a case, with something mainly for external yous, which by design ahad to be more rugged, adding to costs. On to the scanner the usb scanner coul transfer data to the host 4x faster than the parallel scanner( assuming ofc that the scanner was using full speed usb. So you where not really comparing devices with the s
I mean, I stopped buying new iPhones and new laptops because of DVDs and headphone jacks respectively. And I've been using bluetooth headphones primarily for a while now - I just still have an excellent headphone jack based headset that doesn't rely on batteries.
Backups, moving large files one way for cheap (especially deliverables), accessing the data already on CDs/DVDs (e.g. movies), and moving data to legacy systems (which normally require CDs of the right type.) Those are the primary uses.
I mean, given PowerPC was Motorola's replacement for the 68k that move made perfect sense.
Not to mention industry sentiment at the time was that CISC was an obsolete technology.
Even Intel wanted to get off CISC, though in the end their VLIW replacement ended up being a complete dead-end while much to everyone's surprise they were able to keep their CISC designs competitive with RISC.
> Not to mention industry sentiment at the time was that CISC was an obsolete technology. > Even Intel wanted to get off
They did. Nothing since the Pentium Pro is CISC.
Apple had Project Star Trek and knew that MacOS worked fine on Intel. They hoped that PPC would have such great performance that Intel would be left in the dust. It turned out that the PPC design team was worse/slower than the Intel design team and AMD especially came through with a good 64-bit architecture.
I mean, a new phone without a charger wouldn't stop me from charging it. In fact I didn't even bother swapping my bedside charger out with the new one when I last got a new phone.
Sometimes it works out, sometimes it doesn't. For example -
They dropped USB-A from their laptops 4 years ago, but virtually all thumb drives are still USB-A. In fact the default cable for any USB device is still USB-A.
They dropped the headphone jack 4 years ago, but people still complain about not having a headphone jack, phones with headphone jacks are still produced and the overwhelming majority of audio devices still have headphone jacks.
Of course not including a charger with the phone isn't really the same, because it's something you either already have or can buy. It's more like buying a phone with a headphone jack that doesn't come with its own pair of headphones in the box.
Let's not forget... they dropped legacy ports for all USB in what, 1998? The Dell sitting on my desk right now from 2010 has... RS-232, DB-25, and a pair of PS/2 ports on the back of it. Heck, my 3 year old cruncher from supermicro has serial and PS/2 ports still.
And the fact they dropped floppy drives was a HUGE inconvenience. EVERYONE I knew with an iMac had an external floppy drive (or zip drive). There was no real viable alternative for like 5 years.
I can't see most things on the list above as anything
Oh gosh spot the apple fanboi. Bro, Jobs is dead, you can stop following the reality distortion field now.
And then this piece of blatant revisionism:
Apple: Drops Floppy drives Others: Laugh at Apple for dropping Floppy drives Others: Drop Floppy drives
It was: 1. Everyone knows floppies are reaching the end of their life, but there are no great alternatives. 2. Apple drops floppy 3. Everyone owning a mac has to buy a USB external floppy drive to exchange files with the rest of the world. Or maybe a zip drive, except they were never ubiquitous and then they have to find a friend with a flopy drive and zip drive in the same machine 4. Eventually CD-Rs then USB memory takes over and apple fanbois get collective amnesia about how annoying step 3 was.
Everyone gets that technology moves on. This is not some special insight Apple have. all apple do is remove things early, often early enough to be really annoying.
In the case of "legacy" ports, no one cared because Apple's legacy crap was incompatible with the rest of the world. And my brand new Ryzen 3k last year has a "legacy" PS2 port which I use with my "legacy" keyboard, because you know why not? Because it's not apple so you don't have to keep generating waste ebuying new stuff that's why.
Dropping DVD drives first is blatant fanboi revisionism. There were laptops without spinning media before Apple dropped DVD drives. The Hp/Compaq TC1100 shipped without a DVD drive in 2004 (I had one at work), and then Apple completely ripped it off while claiming the design as their own in the famous "rounded corners" patent, because it looks like an iPad.
The headphone jack is impressive: Apple found a way of making headphones both much more expensive and have a much shorter service life. By the end of their life, floppies and DVDs were of marginal utility. For the remaining "legacy" ports USB was superior to the common uses being faster, hotplug and supporting autodetection, chaining etc. For the headphone jack... wireless isn't universally superior by any stretch. And the data ports are more fragile.
If you want to credit anyone for the last point, credit the EU. They said "you will standardise on chargers or we will force you to". The entire point was to allow for reuse of these things to cut down on e waste. Apple resisted for the longest time and fanbois are now apparently claiming credit. This is despite gadgets coming without power bricks for several years now. Amazing!
Well I did not get onto the mac bandwagon untill the erly 2000s so pkease forgive tis possibly silly question Was there in 1998 a great deal of dara exchange berween mac an pc users wher floppies was the only way to achieve it? Or did mack and pc users for a large part exsist in there own separate silos?
I wasn't on the bandwagon, myself, but I had friends and the odd family member with a mac. If you only ever wrote your own documents and took your own photos etc, then it was fine. if you needed to exchange anything with anyone else then floppies were the only way to go. I remember, for example, students all had floppy drives for that reason.
Macs read PC disks just fine. Except they'd leave weird resource forks on your FAT disk. And text files would save weird line endings. Just save in Windows Word.doc format.
PCs didn't understand Mac HFS and would prompt you to format the disk.
Yep, but in the case of the Nintendo 3DS XL (AFAIK it was the only one without a charger), it was just a $10 tax.
Their charger was not standard, and not even compatible with the rest of their lineup, except for the DSi, 3DS and New 3DS. The DS, DS lite, Wii U tablet, Wii U "pro" gamepads and Switch all use different chargers. At least, the last two are USB, but for the Switch, it is recommended to use the official charger and not use it for other devices due to some power negotiation weirdness.
It's impossible to easily reply to you post since you've cherry picked your history to make Apple look good while completely ignoring that only some of those things were a good decision by Apple, and only some of them were even *possible*. So let's go through the list:
Non-USB ports: Apple dropped them at a time when they had fully functioning USB stacks and at a time when USB wasn't even a module in the Linux kernel. In the wider PC industry moving to only USB was always an end goal. No one laughed at Apple
And yet i can’t remember there being anywhere as much uproar in the media when they did as when apple did this year, are we seeing a somewhat double standard here? I would say maybe, or it might just be tge same old thing ie when most people read FairPhone at the time I guess there reaction would be something like “zzzz whats that” and they would swiftly move along to something else thus not creating clicks/ ad views. Now publush something about apple, that gives some sections of the andro
Yeah. As an non-Apple user I confirm you're mostly right. Also, sometimes they seem to copy the worst Apple decisions.
Luckily, some aren't too blind and the headphone jack seems to be appearing in more new phone models.
You forgot the worst one: Apple puts a glass screen on a phone, where all the competition made sure their products could fall from a table at all angles without breaking, and the whole world followed. The second worst: put a phone on the market that barely lasted a day, where other phones lasted 4 days to a week and some up to 5 weeks (Xenia 9@9 I'm looking at you). Anyone can tell me how great a market leader Apple is, they ruined several important aspects in the name of bling...
The Industry Follows Apple Again (Score:5, Insightful)
Apple: Drops non-USB Legacy ports
Others: Laugh at Apple for dropping non-USB Legacy ports
Others: Drop non-USB Legacy ports
Apple: Drops Floppy drives
Others: Laugh at Apple for dropping Floppy drives
Others: Drop Floppy drives
Apple: Drops Floppy CD/DVD Rom drives
Others: Laugh at Apple for dropping CD/DVDs drives
Others: Drop CD/DVD ROM drives
Apple: Drops Headphone jack
Others: Laugh at Apple for dropping Headphone jack
Others: Drop Headphone jack
Apple: Drops Charging brick
Others: Laugh at Apple for dropping Charging brick
Others: Drop Charging brick
Re: (Score:3)
Apple: Drops x86
Others: Laugh at Apple for dropping x86
Others: Drop x86
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considering no one has dropped x86.. . . . . . .
Re: (Score:2)
Considering Microsoft finally added the x86 compatibility to Windows on ARM as soon as Apple launched M1 based Macs I don't think your comment will age very well. Slightly trolling here, sorry.
More seriously, the reason for dropping x86 is not Apple saying so but the fact that we've essentially hit the limits of Moore's law. You can't make transistors smaller than a couple nanometers. The only way to increase computing power is to marry all purpose processing cores with purpose-built cores that do heavy lif
Re: (Score:3)
What is with you Apple fanatics always wanting to re-write history to only make it look like Apple does anything in tech?
Here is some documentation from Microsoft about Windows 10 ARM being able to run x86 code in Feb of 2018:
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/uwp/porting/apps-on-arm-x86-emulation#:~:text=Emulation%20for%20x86%20apps%20makes%20the%20rich%20ecosystem,unless%20it%20calls%20specific%20APIs%20(%20IsWoW64Process2%20). [microsoft.com]
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
I thought I had made it clear that my comment was tongue in cheek. Anyway. What I was referring to with my comment was this https://www.theregister.com/20... [theregister.com] Windows 10 on ARM didn't have an x86-64 emulation and it still doesn't except in preview. The timing could be coincidental but Apple announced Rosetta 2 and Microsoft realised they need to show the world they have already been working on the same thing, too.
You also make a lot of assumptions about me. I am not an Apple fanboy. I use Windows 10, Kubunt
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It is happening. I'm seeing CPUs by Ampere Computing going to 80 cores. It is only a matter of time before ARM or RISC-V reach speed parity with at least the desktop line of CPUs, if not competing head to head with EPYC or Xeons.
Re: (Score:2)
Others: Laugh at Apple for dropping x86
Who?
Re:The Industry Follows Apple Again (Score:4, Informative)
Not a mac user, but is this correct?
Apple: Drops escape key
Others: Laugh at Apple for dropping escape key
Apple: Restores escape key
Re: (Score:3)
From 2016: "Apple's New Macbooks Are Dumping the Escape Key"
https://www.popularmechanics.c... [popularmechanics.com]
Re:The Industry Follows Apple Again (Score:5, Insightful)
Apple: lets have a 1 button mouse
Others: 2/3 button mouse
Apple: lets add a button
Wrong (Score:1)
Apple: Drops escape key
Apple never dropped the escape key.
On the TouchBar keyboards, the top left is always escape unless the application you are using specially asks for it to be something else (in which case it would not use the escape key).
So Apple never dropped the escape key, they simply age some apps the ability to re-map that area to something else (just as in other apps what esc does can change).
Re: (Score:2)
So Apple never dropped the escape key,
as a vim user with (until recently) one of those awful machines who suffered at work for several years: fuck you and the horse you rode in on. :)
Seriously though. They dropped the key and replaced it with a soft keyboard. There's a reason they didn't replace the entire keyboard with a soft keyboard because it sucks for regular use. The lack of an actual escape key was bad if you wanted to use it regularly.
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as a vim user with (until recently) one of those awful machines
As a vim user who long ago mapped "jj" to I wouldn't have noticed, but I haven't used a Mac since the 90s so it's a moot point. I've never come across a need to type two consecutive "j"s in insert mode, so this mapping works great. I can switch from insert mode to normal mode without taking my fingers off the home row.
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No, it's correct. Apple got rid of the escape key. As in an actual physical key. Yes, there was the touch bar, but that's not a physical key, but a soft keyboard. After much mocking and complaining, Apple later restored the physical escape key.
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Around 2015-2016, Lenovo had a laptop which replaced the escape key and the function keys with a touch bar... which didn't work under Linux. They also remapped things like the "|" key to really oddball locations. I had to use one for a work laptop for a month or so... wound up using a USB keyboard with it, since it was such a pain to use.
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Many computers still have legacy ports too, particularly PS2 ports as gamers think they offer lower latency. Many motherboards still have serial port headers too, often unpopulated but still...
Re:The Industry Follows Apple Again (Score:5, Insightful)
It's called progress...
The USB-C port is better, it's reversible, can support higher power charging, can support thunderbolt and displayport etc.
If you kept providing USB-A ports, then people would continue using them and peripheral manufacturers would continue producing devices for them. They would ignore the USB-C ports entirely.
It happened before, USB was around for several years, and was just "some weird port that we never use and dont know what its for"... Often motherboards would include USB headers on the board but they didn't even bother breaking them out to actual sockets on the outside of the case. Windows 95 lacked USB support initially, as did NT. I had several such boards back in the day. Everyone continued to use rs232, parallel ports, ps/2 mouse and keyboard etc.
Once Apple came out with the iMac that ONLY had USB ports, third parties stepped up and started providing USB devices. The same thing is happening today, there are now USB-C devices widely available and Apple users will generally prefer these devices due to the lack of dongle.
And how is this greedy? USB-C is an open standard, anyone is free to support it or produce devices for it. If anything it's the opposite, before the days of USB Apple used several proprietary ports, after the introduction of USB you could now use third party peripherals far more easily. It's the same today, you no longer need to buy an Apple charger - any USB-C charger will work if it provides enough power.
USB-C becoming ubiquitous benefits everyone, not just Apple.
Re:The Industry Follows Apple Again (Score:4, Informative)
USB-C is an open standard
Not to split hairs but USB is absolutely not an open standard. You must pay a license for it, hence the reason there's a whole vendor ID in the protocol. Additionally, the USB logo is copyrighted and there's a fee if you want to include the logo on your device. Now does anyone enforce all of that? Not really.
Now if you take a USB header and do whatever you want with it and not slap the USB logo on it (which you might see for some hobby electronic kits that take USB-A to two pin 5v header for breadboard) you can do that. It's just when you want to interoperate with other USB devices and hubs that you cross that copyright and patent domain.
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I've made a few "USB" products that were not certified, it's not at all uncommon, especially with industrial devices. For consumer stuff it's worth doing it legit, last time I checked it was $2000/year for membership which nets you the IDs and right to use the logo if you self-certify. Having said that I made consumer stuff without legit IDs as well...
The worst abuse I've ever seen was a cheap lamp my brother bought. It used USB A sockets to connect the 18V AC power supply to the lamp. The PSU side was a so
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USB type A connectors are used for JVS arcade game controls, which are not compatible with USB. The connectors are just widely available, convenient, and tough.
Re:The Industry Follows Apple Again (Score:5, Insightful)
If you kept providing USB-A ports, then people would continue using them and peripheral manufacturers would continue producing devices for them.
I mean, Apple dropped USB-A from the laptops 4 years ago and I still don't see the number of flashdrives and devices that are USB-A decreasing. Unfortunately the use of dongles with USB-A ports on them has just become the norm instead.
Windows 95 lacked USB support initially, as did NT. I had several such boards back in the day. Everyone continued to use rs232, parallel ports, ps/2 mouse and keyboard etc. Once Apple came out with the iMac that ONLY had USB ports, third parties stepped up and started providing USB devices.
Well, lets be fair here, USB didn't even exist when Windows 95 was released. It was brand new when Apple released the G3 iMac. That may well have helped speed up adoption a little, but with IBM, Intel, Microsoft, and several PC manufacturers being the creators of USB it was clear they intended it for PC use.
Re:The Industry Follows Apple Again (Score:5, Insightful)
It's a bit of a myth that Apple spurred USB adoption. It was really a combination of things.
USB 1.1 made it viable for PCs by allowing the BIOS to support USB keyboards fairly easily, without the need for a full USB stack. 1.1 also introduced a much better test suite and clearer documentation, although to this day it's still a bit of a mess.
Around that time cheap chipsets for USB started to appear, both for the PC side and the peripheral side. In particular dual USB/PS2 keyboard and mouse controllers. Once cheap controllers were available it became possible to make cheap peripherals that were competitive with PS2 ones.
USB 2.0 added enough bandwidth for peripherals like drives and scanners and cameras.
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USB 1.0 came out in January 1996, the iMac came out in August 1998. USB was more than 2 years old when the iMac was released. USB predates the release of NT4, which lacked support for it. Windows 95 OSR2.1 first had USB support in August 1997, a year before the iMac but more than a year after the first spec and supporting hardware was available.
Microsoft were part of the group that initially started developing USB in 1994 whereas Apple were not. You'd have expected them to be shipping support a bit sooner t
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The USB-C port is better, it's reversible, can support higher power charging, can support thunderbolt and displayport etc.
It's also more fragile and less commonly supported by random crap.
If you kept providing USB-A ports, then people would continue using them and peripheral manufacturers would continue producing devices for them. They would ignore the USB-C ports entirely.
I want a laptop not a crusade. My SO's Carbon X1 has a smattering of everything, A, C, headphones, HDMI, micro SD, micro SIM, even a min
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USB-C is supposed to be the most robust USB connector so far, and in my experience is pretty durable. They changed the mechanical design to make the sockets extremely strong, much less prone to damage than USB-A.
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USB-C is supposed to be the most robust USB connector so far, and in my experience is pretty durable. They changed the mechanical design to make the sockets extremely strong, much less prone to damage than USB-A.
I wonder how that will play out. Micro B was quite fragile. I don't think I've ever broken a full sized A socket. They're pretty big, there's a lot of meat in there and a ton of space between the pins, especially for version 1 and 2, which make up a good fraction of my peripherals.
What did they do?
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I've seen a lot of broken A sockets, especially in public places like airports and cafes. It's usually the pins and the plastic carrier for them that are damaged.
The issue seems to be that they can be damaged by trying to force the connector in upside down or by objects poked in there.
The C sockets fix all that, and the metal housing is a little deeper relative to the pins to ensure they don't get bent when yanking on the cable.
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Having all these ports only makes sense if you use all of them at the same time.
Dongles are only a minor inconvenience when you're plugging something in anyway, what difference does a small dongle make when attached to the end of a long ethernet cable?
Need ethernet? you have one ethernet port, i have 4 USB-C ports which could let me attach 4 ethernet dongles if needed.
Don't need ethernet? You have a redundant useless port that's just going to get clogged with dirt, i have USB-C ports that can be used for ot
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If you want to use that many ports at the same time, then a docking station may be for you.
Sure dongles might be a minor inconvenience. I mean they make your thin, light, fancy laptop need a bag of ancillary crap. And it's one more thing to lose/forget going on travel. It's not like it's a, show stopper, but why pay extra for minor inconveniences? Thing is it's always apple users asking the audience for dongles at conferences because the conference system expects HDMI not USB-C and someone forgot their dong
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It happened before, USB was around for several years, and was just "some weird port that we never use and dont know what its for"... Often motherboards would include USB headers on the board but they didn't even bother breaking them out to actual sockets on the outside of the case. Windows 95 lacked USB support initially, as did NT. I had several such boards back in the day. Everyone continued to use rs232, parallel ports, ps/2 mouse and keyboard etc.
So basically what you're saying is let the Mac users suffer while the industry slowly adopts change and then make the switch to USB-C when we're actually ready, just like USB?
I fully agree with you. All the more reason *not* to standardise on USB-C yet.
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When USB came out, USB peripherals generally had a $30-$50 premium over RS-232 versions. USB floppies were $120 when you could pick up a regular internal version for about $25. I was shopping for a flatbed scanner, and I remember the parallel version was $100 while the USB version was $150. People didn't buy USB because it was hella expensive.
Same thing with SATA CD-ROMs. People continued to buy PATA CD drives for years after hard drives went to SATA, because CD-ROMs with SATA cost about $50 more than t
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USB floppies were $120 when you could pick up a regular internal version for about $25. .
Well could you pkeacy compare like with like ish, that is compare a usb floppy drive with an rs32/ paralell port floppy dive. My point here is that you compared something for internal mounting in a case, with something mainly for external yous, which by design ahad to be more rugged, adding to costs. On to the scanner the usb scanner coul transfer data to the host 4x faster than the parallel scanner( assuming ofc that the scanner was using full speed usb. So you where not really comparing devices with the s
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I mean, I stopped buying new iPhones and new laptops because of DVDs and headphone jacks respectively. And I've been using bluetooth headphones primarily for a while now - I just still have an excellent headphone jack based headset that doesn't rely on batteries.
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The headphone thing I can appreciate, but DVDs drives, what are you using them for?
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Installing software, I live in the USA where our internet options are 12MB AT&T or dialup
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Backups, moving large files one way for cheap (especially deliverables), accessing the data already on CDs/DVDs (e.g. movies), and moving data to legacy systems (which normally require CDs of the right type.) Those are the primary uses.
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Apple : lets go with Power PC
Others : lets continue with with x86
Apple : Lets drop Power PC and go with x86
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Apple : lets go with Power PC
I mean, given PowerPC was Motorola's replacement for the 68k that move made perfect sense.
Not to mention industry sentiment at the time was that CISC was an obsolete technology.
Even Intel wanted to get off CISC, though in the end their VLIW replacement ended up being a complete dead-end while much to everyone's surprise they were able to keep their CISC designs competitive with RISC.
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> Not to mention industry sentiment at the time was that CISC was an obsolete technology.
> Even Intel wanted to get off
They did. Nothing since the Pentium Pro is CISC.
Apple had Project Star Trek and knew that MacOS worked fine on Intel. They hoped that PPC would have such great performance that Intel would be left in the dust. It turned out that the PPC design team was worse/slower than the Intel design team and AMD especially came through with a good 64-bit architecture.
Apple thought that they wou
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Nothing since the Pentium Pro is CISC.
Pentium Pro's ISA absolutely is a CISC one. So is the one of all of Pentium Pro's successors, for reasons of backward compatibility.
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I luved my PowerPC Macs back in the day - they rocked!
I had 3 or 4 of them, I forget exactly
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So, how do you charge the phones then?
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I mean, a new phone without a charger wouldn't stop me from charging it. In fact I didn't even bother swapping my bedside charger out with the new one when I last got a new phone.
Re:The Industry Follows Apple Again (Score:4, Insightful)
Sometimes it works out, sometimes it doesn't. For example -
They dropped USB-A from their laptops 4 years ago, but virtually all thumb drives are still USB-A. In fact the default cable for any USB device is still USB-A.
They dropped the headphone jack 4 years ago, but people still complain about not having a headphone jack, phones with headphone jacks are still produced and the overwhelming majority of audio devices still have headphone jacks.
Of course not including a charger with the phone isn't really the same, because it's something you either already have or can buy. It's more like buying a phone with a headphone jack that doesn't come with its own pair of headphones in the box.
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Let's not forget... they dropped legacy ports for all USB in what, 1998? The Dell sitting on my desk right now from 2010 has... RS-232, DB-25, and a pair of PS/2 ports on the back of it. Heck, my 3 year old cruncher from supermicro has serial and PS/2 ports still.
And the fact they dropped floppy drives was a HUGE inconvenience. EVERYONE I knew with an iMac had an external floppy drive (or zip drive). There was no real viable alternative for like 5 years.
I can't see most things on the list above as anything
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I always just ripped them on my desktop anyway. Better cooling for the transcoding process and plenty of spare 5.25" drive bays.
But yeah, agreed. Streaming sucks.
Re:The Industry Follows Apple Again (Score:5, Informative)
Oh gosh spot the apple fanboi. Bro, Jobs is dead, you can stop following the reality distortion field now.
And then this piece of blatant revisionism:
Apple: Drops Floppy drives
Others: Laugh at Apple for dropping Floppy drives
Others: Drop Floppy drives
It was:
1. Everyone knows floppies are reaching the end of their life, but there are no great alternatives.
2. Apple drops floppy
3. Everyone owning a mac has to buy a USB external floppy drive to exchange files with the rest of the world. Or maybe a zip drive, except they were never ubiquitous and then they have to find a friend with a flopy drive and zip drive in the same machine
4. Eventually CD-Rs then USB memory takes over and apple fanbois get collective amnesia about how annoying step 3 was.
Everyone gets that technology moves on. This is not some special insight Apple have. all apple do is remove things early, often early enough to be really annoying.
In the case of "legacy" ports, no one cared because Apple's legacy crap was incompatible with the rest of the world. And my brand new Ryzen 3k last year has a "legacy" PS2 port which I use with my "legacy" keyboard, because you know why not? Because it's not apple so you don't have to keep generating waste ebuying new stuff that's why.
Dropping DVD drives first is blatant fanboi revisionism. There were laptops without spinning media before Apple dropped DVD drives. The Hp/Compaq TC1100 shipped without a DVD drive in 2004 (I had one at work), and then Apple completely ripped it off while claiming the design as their own in the famous "rounded corners" patent, because it looks like an iPad.
The headphone jack is impressive: Apple found a way of making headphones both much more expensive and have a much shorter service life. By the end of their life, floppies and DVDs were of marginal utility. For the remaining "legacy" ports USB was superior to the common uses being faster, hotplug and supporting autodetection, chaining etc. For the headphone jack... wireless isn't universally superior by any stretch. And the data ports are more fragile.
If you want to credit anyone for the last point, credit the EU. They said "you will standardise on chargers or we will force you to". The entire point was to allow for reuse of these things to cut down on e waste. Apple resisted for the longest time and fanbois are now apparently claiming credit. This is despite gadgets coming without power bricks for several years now. Amazing!
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I wasn't on the bandwagon, myself, but I had friends and the odd family member with a mac. If you only ever wrote your own documents and took your own photos etc, then it was fine. if you needed to exchange anything with anyone else then floppies were the only way to go. I remember, for example, students all had floppy drives for that reason.
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Macs read PC disks just fine. Except they'd leave weird resource forks on your FAT disk. And text files would save weird line endings. Just save in Windows Word .doc format.
PCs didn't understand Mac HFS and would prompt you to format the disk.
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Except apple wasn't first, Nintendo was, they didn't include a charger with their hand held gaming device, the DS.
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Yep, but in the case of the Nintendo 3DS XL (AFAIK it was the only one without a charger), it was just a $10 tax.
Their charger was not standard, and not even compatible with the rest of their lineup, except for the DSi, 3DS and New 3DS. The DS, DS lite, Wii U tablet, Wii U "pro" gamepads and Switch all use different chargers. At least, the last two are USB, but for the Switch, it is recommended to use the official charger and not use it for other devices due to some power negotiation weirdness.
Nintendo is t
Re: The Industry Follows Apple Again (Score:3)
This doesn't mean Apple is brilliant and foresightful; it means industries are driven by market leaders for good or ill.
Oh, and that developing a cadre of consumers who view your brand with something nigh unto religious zealotry is really brilliant.
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It's impossible to easily reply to you post since you've cherry picked your history to make Apple look good while completely ignoring that only some of those things were a good decision by Apple, and only some of them were even *possible*. So let's go through the list:
Non-USB ports: Apple dropped them at a time when they had fully functioning USB stacks and at a time when USB wasn't even a module in the Linux kernel. In the wider PC industry moving to only USB was always an end goal. No one laughed at Apple
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Re:The Industry Follows Apple (Score:1)
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Luckily, some aren't too blind and the headphone jack seems to be appearing in more new phone models.
Re: The Industry Follows Apple Again (Score:2)