And maybe they work, and maybe they don’t make it USB 2.0. I don’t have six peripherals which are USB-a. What You posted is not USBa to USBc
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It's late 2021, is USB-A still relevant for Macs with Apple Silicon?
- Thread starter Adarna
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Uh what? The M1 Mac mini has USB-A ports.
You're right about the laptops, but I hope to see USB-A on the M1 Pro/Max model desktops too next year.
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Works fine for me. Used one the other day to share internet over USB-C on phone to USB-A laptop when I capped out on hotspot. Yes, the cable in the middle needs to be USB-A to micro USB.
http://pdanet.co/install/
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I think the USB standards committee deserves a good deal of the blame here. A single port that can accept a charge, act as a high-speed USB port, and supports DisplayPort passthrough for video? And it's reversible? Amazing! An unprecedented amount of I/O flexibility and future-proofing. Of course, that level of flexibility and complexity means there are a lot of ways manufacturers can implement something, many of which are less-than-ideal.
If the organization who defined the USB-C spec had their act together, they would have anticipated all this and made the standard strict enough to explicitly prevent 3rd parties from making obvious poor design decisions (e.g. requiring all C-to-A adapters must support the full USB 3.1 spec). Instead, they seem to have taken an "anything goes" approach and invested most of their time into coming up with increasingly confusing naming schemes for their standards. As a result, what could have been a fantastic user experience (legacy adapters aside) has ended up being a lot of headaches and trial-and-error.
Presumably Apple assumed the USB people would have sorted this out much quicker than they have, and I guess the re-addition of HDMI and SD is their way of apologizing for making a bad bet.
I don’t know what you’ve been drinking or smoking, but I hope you brought enough to share ?
Apple has always killed off ports it deemed obsolete and quickly too. USB, Firewire, (mini) displayport, the old iPod/iPhone connector, the headphone jack on iPhones… the list goes on.
I’m not sure if I like them bringing back HDMI and an SD-slot on the new MBPs or not. I love magsafe being back, but those other ports feel almost like a step back.
You posted a wrong USB adapter.
We are looking for USB-A to USB-C adapter, not micro-USB to USB-C adapter.
Everytime people say USB-A isn't relevant anymore, I show them this picture of the Xbox Series X without a single USB-C and all USB-A. Microsoft has done enough research and figured out that USB-A is far more in use than USB-C for accessories. USB-A isn't dying anytime soon.
Again, I wish Apple included USB-A. I'm still buying the new MBP regardless.
Or, they'd prefer to limit functionality and performance for storage/data accessories to sell their proprietary storage expansion device.
Not to mention how much cheaper USB-A charging circuitry is (with a much lower wattage cap) than USB-C.
And I think this gets at the heart of the argument.
The lesson Apple keeps teaching and which others keep ignoring is - to create true meaningful change in a market, you need to force change. By taking bold unapologetic stances. Apple was able to kill off Flash, but they never got Firewire and Thunderbolt to take off, for instance. But the point is that Apple dared to try. At a time when every other company was content to simply reinforce the status quo. And I respect Apple for that.
Yes, plenty of people still use USB-A peripherals, from flash drives to wired mice to wireless presentations remotes, because they still work, but then you also think back to how long it took to transition from VGA projectors to HDMI TVs in conference rooms, and it makes you wonder - where do you draw the line between continuing to support an existing technology vs dropping support in favour of pushing for something newer and better?
Instead of running HDMI cables, why not set up Apple TVs or Miracast dongles in meeting rooms where people can project their screens wirelessly to? USB-C drives do exist (I have made it a point to invest exclusively in them for a while now, and just purchased another Samsung T7 drive). I am using a Microsoft bluetooth mouse that connects directly to my laptop, but plenty of my colleagues still use mice with receivers. The whole point of USB-C is that it is supposedly versatile enough to be able to go all-in on, yet the new MBP got a HDMI port back for meeting purposes.
I am currently using a M1 MBA with 2 USB-C ports, and it's frankly a luxury after working with an iPad with a single lightning port for years, and having optimised my workflow around wireless tech and minimal cables. Maybe I am the outlier here in that when Apple asks me to jump, I ask "how far", but this also goes back a decade to that fateful day when I decided I would embrace the Apple ecosystem in its entirety and not fight whatever changes Apple implemented, for better or for worse.
I don't have an answer to any of this. Without anyone pushing, it may well be that a decade later, we will still be using USB-A accessories, and maybe there's nothing wrong with that, but at what cost to progress?
GUILTY as charge . done it before . bring apple tv to meeting room.
I think this is where the thin/weight argument along with "forcing" new standards lose me. Apple basically admitted defeat to bring back "legacy" ports with the exception of said USB-A in the title of this thread. Was carrying dongles & in some extreme cases a separate dedicated device that needs to be connected to an outlet worth the extra grams saved in weight and a few centimeters thinner? Apple doesn't seem to think so anymore and assuming this is why older machines stuck around as enough users were reluctant to let their convenient ports go.GUILTY as charge . done it before . bring apple tv to meeting room.
I use USB-A often on a 13 year old laptop. I don’t buy the wear & tear argument.
life is hard with dongle thou.
ipad - easy disccusion ( windows couterpart - you can flip it no need ipad and separate it )
ipad mini to usb - dongle ligthing no camera no working
airdrop - the only good part but how pen drive on air drop ?( only 2012 above laptop)
apple tv - suitable on meeting room big, you dont want to long long hdmi cable cum adapter ? hhehe
** thinner mean nothing to me , the new improve macbook kinda nice development to people whom travel a lot like me before .
USBA needs to just die already. People running old tech need to just get a dongle or let it go. I hate plugging it upside down 90% of the time then flipping it over and its wrong another 70% of the time.
Because the HDMI cable is already there, and it works. People in general don't want to spend time and money on reinventing the wheel, when the existing solution is already good enough.
WiFi in a meeting room, on the other hand, is a hard problem. If there are too many people, there may not be enough bandwidth for streaming, because everyone is using their laptops for something. And if the presenter is from outside the organization, getting them the credentials to access the WiFi can be extremely nontrivial.
But what does that say about the people here at Macrumours? There’s so much criticism about Apple supposedly not innovating enough, yet the critics themselves sure seem pretty fixed in their ways and unable or willing to advance alongside with Apple.
The absence of a HDMI port could lead to people either falling back on an adaptor or experimenting with wireless projection technology that could lead to a rethink of how meetings and presentations are done.j no
The crux of all of these is that in times of paradigm shifts, there are two types of people. There are people that embrace the shift, perhaps out of enthusiasm, fandom, or maybe just because they don’t know any better. Then there are people that do know better, but also see the challenges in changing and use those challenges to anchor criticism.
The fact that change takes time should not cause those of us that know the limitations of something new to dig our heels in. Especially those that prefer to fixate on obstacles as seeing only one aspect of the change rather than how one change can cause many things to change as a reaction to a new normal.
The technology is here, but it feels like we are still sorely lacking the cultural mindset change that will permit the technology change to happen.
And to me, that’s a real shame.
Most of what is called innovation is simply marketing. It's an attempt to make people buy new devices sooner than makes sense.
Apple's attempt to switch to USB-C only in 2016 was a good example of this. It failed, because the technology was not ready. The actual innovation was missing.
Today, 5 years later, the missing technology may finally be here. With Thunderbolt 4, we are starting to see reliable USB-C hubs. Hubs that connect to a single USB-C/Thunderbolt port and provide multiple ports of the same type. Until now, people who used more than a handful of peripherals needed those "legacy" ports anyway. Once you ran out of USB-C ports, you had to use dongles and docking stations with DisplayPort / HDMI / USB-A ports for connecting the devices. As a result, peripheral manufacturers had little reason to switch to USB-C, and the transition never really started.
Not sure I agree. i think we have seen a slow progression away from USB-A to C. Even my new BMW has USB-C, EU is standardizing on USB-C for phones and so forth. The fact that PCs were slower in moving over and often kept an USB-A port probably slowed things down.
Do you plug & unplug them more than 2-4x a day in the more than 4745 days you've owned it?
Cable plug and the cable itself may develop breaks
A counter point.
We need to remember that there is a whole larger world out there that aren't just based on Apple devices. Doing NLE and 50MP RAW files are not their daily jam.
FW & TB have a very limited applicable audience for the throughput & master to master that is useful for. FW was for 480p, 720p and even 1080i content while TB was for 2K, 4K and 8K.
>90% of people with computers did not need that and to lower cost they stuck to economical USB-A.
As for Apple pushing USB-C onto all Macs by 2016 has more to do with
- optimizing their supply chain by simplifying the SKU of ports they manage
- leveraging economies of scale by increasing the volume of a single port they sell
- making development & support cost for I/O simpler & cheaper
- throughput
- ergonomics
- health & safety in regards to higher wattage that will be spec'd for it
That's unlikely. If they wanted to, they could simply software disable gaming any HD connected via USB-C.
Exactly. USB-C isn't 100% pro. It's more expensive. Hence, most accessories sold today are still USB-A.