Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Why aren't motherboards mostly USB-C by now? (2021)

philip.greenspun.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

191–200 of 511 posts

Re: Why aren't motherboards mostly USB-C by now? (2021)

#191

Post by arcticbull »

picture wrote: post #190
arcticbull wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

USB A was released in 1996, it's older than I suspect the majority of HN readers at this point. An A to C cable is entirely passive, so not exactly a big deal to get a cheap adapter. Not sure I'd rely on keyboards as the standard bearer for 'not a relic' many of them still support PS/2 via passive adapter. That was announced in 1987 and is older than me.

Comparing technology to human lifetimes doesn't seem very relevant. Even not accounting for broad categories like "fire" or "language", we're still using individual technology from "long ago" like knives, forks, pen and paper, etc. It's fine to make improvements that keep backwards compatibility (more ergonomic scissor should be able to cut the same paper), but changing connector just because it's old is unwise. The…

> ... but changing connector just because it's old is unwise

Well not because it's old, I'm a huge fan of my 1/8" headphone jack.

Type C is intentionally significantly more functional (not to mention the ergonomics of reversibility) but also fully backwards-compatible requiring only passive routing to get you a Type A adapter.

> The issue of type C is that it's trying to accommodate the entire spectrum of applications from very high bandwidth to very low cost.

That's up to the host. You can support just USB 2.0 with the same signals routed as a vanilla type A connector.

There's even super cheap USB-C receptacles that only have the relevant USB 2.0 pins routed out. Like this one [1].

There's really no reason I can think of not to use one.

[1] https://www.digikey.ca/en/products/detail/gct/USB4125-GF-A/1...

Re: Why aren't motherboards mostly USB-C by now? (2021)

#192

Post by Yg6tr »

treyd wrote: post #120

It's very easy to bodge together a USB-A connector in a pinch in a way that USB-C just isn't. USB-A is simple and there's literally tens of billions of devices that would be made just a little bit closer to being e-waste if USB-A ports became substantially less common than they already are on mainstream devices. Adapters exist and should exist, but we shouldn't have to rely on them.

[flagged]

Re: Why aren't motherboards mostly USB-C by now? (2021)

#193

Post by chx »

picture wrote: post #183
arcticbull wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interestingly enough, they're specced the opposite way. > Standard USB has a minimum rated lifetime of 1,500 cycles of insertion and removal, the Mini-USB receptacle increased this to 5,000 cycles, and the newer Micro-USB and USB-C receptacles are both designed for a minimum rated lifetime of 10,000 cycles of insertion and removal. [1] > To accomplish this, a locking device was added and the leaf-spring was moved fro…

I think it's a bit ironic that the cable is considered more costly than the receptacle, which is generally true if you consider the device as a whole, but now we have multiple hundreds of dollars thunderbolt cables and the cap on the actual receptacle component is below $10 even for ones with support for higher speeds. But then again, most people don't have the SMD rework tooling to be able to easily replace receptac…

> now we have multiple hundreds of dollars thunderbolt cables

This is mostly an exaggeration.

Apple has a $160 3m 40Gbps cable but Cable Matters has the same for $70 (and Trebleet has a 2.5m one for $50).

The 25 feet 40gbps cable from Pure Fi is the only I can think of that fits the "multiple hundreds' description at $200 but then again it's an active optical cable (it's not compatible with plain USB).

> the cap on the actual receptacle component is below $10 even for ones with support for higher speeds.

Maybe the actual C connector they started with is below $10 but you are looking at rather expensive redriver chips inside and careful engineering to care for the signal integrity at 40gbps.

Re: Why aren't motherboards mostly USB-C by now? (2021)

#194

Post by stkdump »

gattis wrote: post #79

any device that doesnt need a 20gbps or higher link is better off connected to your motherboard via a usb-a to usb-c cable. the "a" connector has not been deprecated. in some ways it is the superior connector, higher mating cycles, less fragile, less likely to get ripped loose, much more torque required to bend, and so on. the "c" connector is more useful on the opposite end where you will be plugging in and out more…

> the "a" connector has not been deprecated.

Actually, it is:

> The three sizes of USB connectors are the default, or standard, format intended for desktop or portable equipment, the mini intended for mobile equipment, which was deprecated when it was replaced by the thinner micro size, all of which were deprecated in USB 3.2 in favor of Type-C.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/USB_hardware#Connectors

Re: Why aren't motherboards mostly USB-C by now? (2021)

#195

Post by dwaite »

makeitdouble wrote: post #21
scarface_74 wrote: post #6

One criticism of Apple back in the Ive days was the lack of practicality. I like the fact that Apple relented on the MacBook Pros and they have an HDMI port. I don’t want to have to use dongles unnecessarily. > Apple fanboys/fangirls/fanothers: even the Mac Pro includes two legacy USB-A ports (admittedly it also has four Thunderbolt ports). Why is this relic of old tech cluttering the clean design of an Apple product…

I found the return of the HDMI and SD card reader so refreshing but also so puzzling. On one hand that's what we asked for. On the other hand it was in the same wave as giving up on the touch bar, slowing (stopping ?) the evolution of the iPad, no touch support on the laptops when the design changes were hinting at it. Basically it felt like they froze the hardware form factors in time to solly focus on the ARM trans…

> On one hand that's what we asked for. On the other hand it was in the same wave as giving up on the touch bar, slowing (stopping ?) the evolution of the iPad, no touch support on the laptops when the design changes were hinting at it.

Apple typically tries for a fixed design cycle - the 2016 MacBook Pro design changed in 2021, so you can hypothesize when the next significant revision.

Loud voices stated that pros hated the keyboard, hated the Touch Bar, hated having to use dongles to do certain tasks like give a presentation or pull in photos from their camera. People also waxed poetic about MagSafe.

Lo and behold, the next version changed the keyboard, dropped the Touch Bar, and added HDMI and SD card slots, and added back MagSafe as a charging option.

The iPad has had hardware revisions since then (it has gone from A15X to M2) but there has been some hold-up on rolling out new models. The oddity is that nobody reporting based on supply chain leaks has knowledge here.

My suspicion is that there was originally a launch planned for March 2023 of new Air, Pro, Mini, and two new Apple Pencil models. For some reason - all we got was a new base Pencil model this year, and that was only released last month.

I know of no design changes to laptop hardware that hinted there would be touch support. The software design changes in MacOS 11 and beyond have been around UX alignment with iOS, and more specifically iPadOS. Apple wants the 'mobile' team that works on iOS apps to see that there is a supported and intuitive way to adopt their codebase to iPad and Mac releases, rather than having the 'web' team wrap the code in Electron for Mac and letting iPad run in iPhone compatibility mode.

This is why iPadOS has been gaining Mac-like features (mouse/trackpad support, keyboard shortcuts, multitasking/multi-monitor enhancements to name a few larger ones)

> Basically it felt like they froze the hardware form factors in time to solly focus on the ARM transition and the Vision Pro.

The Pro models have a design expected to accommodate the M1 through M5. Several iPad models are all due for a design change, but for whatever reason thats gummed up.

I would expect if design resources are taken up by Vision Pro, they don't break or pause their iterative process - they just have less manpower to propose and implement changes in an iteration.

Re: Why aren't motherboards mostly USB-C by now? (2021)

#197

Post by demondemidi »

userbinator wrote: post #154

My experience has shown that USB C connectors are far more fragile than A, and every time I plug one in, for some reason the fit just feels vague and unsatisfying. An A plug, when you get it the right way, slides in solidly. As others have mentioned, C seems to have been designed to be the smallest possible, which makes sense for mobile devices, but not for a desktop and its peripherals.

> but not for a desktop and its peripherals.

This doesn't make sense to me. Why should it be bigger?

Re: Why aren't motherboards mostly USB-C by now? (2021)

#198

Post by arcticbull »

scarface_74 wrote: post #6

One criticism of Apple back in the Ive days was the lack of practicality. I like the fact that Apple relented on the MacBook Pros and they have an HDMI port. I don’t want to have to use dongles unnecessarily. > Apple fanboys/fangirls/fanothers: even the Mac Pro includes two legacy USB-A ports (admittedly it also has four Thunderbolt ports). Why is this relic of old tech cluttering the clean design of an Apple product…

> This is naive. The chip hardware support to have 2 extra USB A ports is nothing compared to having two extra USB C/Thunderbolt ports and USB C/Thunderbolt is overkill for many situations.

Type C doesn't require anything more than USB 2.0 with the same signals routed out. There's no difference whatsoever. Type C is just a connector. Yes there will be more chip support if you decide to make the connector more fully-functional but that design choice is on the device manufacturer. They do not need to do that to have a Type C port.

Re: Why aren't motherboards mostly USB-C by now? (2021)

#199

Post by hurryer »

arcticbull wrote: post #176
userbinator wrote: post #154

My experience has shown that USB C connectors are far more fragile than A, and every time I plug one in, for some reason the fit just feels vague and unsatisfying. An A plug, when you get it the right way, slides in solidly. As others have mentioned, C seems to have been designed to be the smallest possible, which makes sense for mobile devices, but not for a desktop and its peripherals.

Interestingly enough, they're specced the opposite way. > Standard USB has a minimum rated lifetime of 1,500 cycles of insertion and removal, the Mini-USB receptacle increased this to 5,000 cycles, and the newer Micro-USB and USB-C receptacles are both designed for a minimum rated lifetime of 10,000 cycles of insertion and removal. [1] > To accomplish this, a locking device was added and the leaf-spring was moved fro…

Minimum is just that, minimum.

Have you ever seen a broken standard USB port or connector? Me not once in my entire life, unlike micro-USB or USB-C.

Re: Why aren't motherboards mostly USB-C by now? (2021)

#200

Post by dagmx »

imoverclocked wrote: post #26
nfriedly wrote: post #13

> mechanical hard drive and a feeble 8 GB of RAM (is that even enough to run Windows by itself?) Windows 10 runs acceptably on a Core 2 Duo with 4 GB of RAM - this was my son's gaming PC until a couple of months ago. (It did have an SSD, though - a mechanical hard drive would certainly have reduced the snappiness.)

It’s pretty crazy that an operating system needs that much at all. I mean, we all get used to these big numbers but 4GB is actually a lot of bits. A single GB can store more books than a human can read in their lifetime. Somehow, we have accepted that the most fundamental piece of software on a computer should require many lifetimes worth of books of RAM. We have come a long way from thinking we would never need more…

But you’re conflating data at rest vs data in memory.

A pdf for example can be very small but then take up considerably more memory to display an embedded image once it’s done decompressing for render. Similarly text is more expensive just by virtue of higher resolution displays.

What we ask of our machines has expanded greatly, and the immediacy with which people want things to load is more exacting too, so a lot of content is kept warm in memory.

I’m not saying 4GB is a healthy amount and I agree there’s likely room for optimization, but let’s not also act like there aren’t huge advances in what computers do to necessitate that either

Post reply on HN