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xkcd 927 - How Standards Proliferate
(See: A/C chargers, character encodings, instant messaging, etc.)
Situation: There are 14 competing standards.
Cueball and Ponytail stand facing each other:
Cueball: 14?! Ridiculous! We need to develop one universal standard that covers everyone’s use cases.
Ponytail: Yeah!
Soon: Situation: we did it our standard beat all the other ones and is universal yay :D
Apple was almost certainly going to do it fairly soon anyway.
Starting 2015, any new Macbook chassis’ (2015 Macbook, 2016 Macbook Pro, 2018 Macbook Air) only had USB-C ports and 3.5mm jack. Took heavy criticism from users for them to walk back on this later and add other useful ports back. For a while there, Apple users were THE driving force behind USB-C dongles being designed and manufactured for computer usage (obviously phones already have USB-C).
The Lightning port came with a promise of “we won’t change ports for 10 years” after they moved away from 30 pin. The EU enforcing USB-C came into effect riiight as the 10 year promise expired. They started selling Lightning based iPhones in 2012 and the last new model with Lightning came out in 2022.
That being said, I’m still grateful that the EU mandated it. Not just because of Apple though. Because of all kinds of devices that are NOT smartphones. Barrel jacks, Micro USB, etc, should all become obsolete now.
a while back i bought a small portable vacuum cleaner, and it’s so fucking nice that it finally has USB-C.
No more dedicated cables, i can just fucking keep an extra charging cable at the other end of my room and plug stuff in there, and in a pinch i can also use my phone charging cable.
It really is like we’ve finally emerged from a seemingly endless fog, and all of a sudden we can actually see more than 10 meters in front of us. How the fuck did we just accept the fog??