It's relatively well known that I'm pretty excited for our unified connector USB Type C future.
The industry is off to a rough start with this new standard. In the time before it thought anybody was paying attention, Apple built a few non-compliant cables and the original 12-inch (Retina) MacBook used some methods to charge that weren't quite compliant with the Power Delivery spec. In addition, systems like the Lenovo Yoga 910 introduce weirdness into the whole thing by using the Type C connector for ports that do certain things, but not others, for no discernable reason. The biggest of these is that it has a dedicated charging port which doesn't support display or USB functionality, and one other Type C port that performs functions other than power deliver.
In addition to the confusion between USB Type C and Thunderbolt 3 and the different things some laptops do (such as USB power-only connectors) there are different situations concerning things like video output. How do you get HDMI or DisplayPort video out of a Type C port? There are alt-modes for each of these things, but not all systems support all of the alt-modes. You could use a DisplayPort to HDMI adapter, or there's also things like DisplayLink adapters and docking stations. All of this will also depend on how displays are configured within a system. I suspect that outside of laptops and certain OEM computers (probably specific genres, like NUC or Mac mini style computers), our existing video connector situation is here to stay.
There is a lot of consternation
in
some circles. (Engadget and other similar tech sites also had a fit when Apple made it harder to remove batteries in 2010 or 2011.) The tech press and reviews of systems like the new MacBook Pro family of systems from Apple have been quick to point out what a mess everything is. I'm convinced that things aren't nearly as messy as we all want to believe though. For starters, Apple's Type C ports (mostly, 1) don't discriminate.
I don't think the situation is as dire as many want to think. Laptop users have needed to carry dongles since literally forever. In the '90s, Apple's laptops used a unique display output connector that nothing else they built used. The cable wasn't included, it was an add-on you needed to buy separately, and there was only one cable available, one that adapted the proprietary port to use a Mac monitor.
Today, USB Type C is an industry standard that should work not only with Apple's own adapters, but with third party products like the LG UltraFine displays, StarTech and Anker adapters, and so on. I think the key is that the industry needs to decide quickly what the best strategies for things like "HDMI output" are and then retailers need to do a better job only stocking compliant cables, chargers, and other accessories. People talk a pretty big talk about definitely needing all kinds of things on their laptops. Heck, at a previous time I was a big cheerleader for this kind of thing. In the next few years, I think people will develop a small, but growing and ideally good collection of accessories until such a time that it starts to make sense to buy things that use Type C directly.
There's a lot of potential for USB Type C to be a much better technology for all of this kind of stuff than we've had before. The LG UltraFine displays, for example, are 4k and 5k monitors using DisplayPort and ThunderBolt transport, with Power Delivery to charge and run a system, and a hub for more peripherals. This is the final form of something Apple has tried over and over to do with varying levels of success for at least 20 years(2). These displays could even be the power source for small desktop computers, such as the Mac mini or the Intel NUC. These systems generally use less than 100 watts of power and would be great candidates for a single cable connection to a monitor that also provides power and a USB hub.
In terms of what exactly people will end up getting, I think it's just a matter of what the needs are. I'm confident that I could take a new MacBook Pro (or similarly equipped Windows computer) out of the box and get to work with no real trouble. I never use wired networking on most of my portable computers today, and the only real peripheral I regularly use with my Surface 3 is a Bluetooth mouse. I know that I would end up with either a multi-port adapter (to get HDMI, a type A, and a pass-through Type C connector) or one or two type A adapters, and I would look for cables such as the C to Lightning adapter for my iPhone and a C to Micro USB 3.0 or two to use with my large fleet of external hard disks. Long-term, I would probably buy the SanDisk SD card reader, and look at migrating my Mac data to a disk like the Seagate Innov8. Drobo also has a new model with a Type C connector available.
In the future, I think we're going to see some interesting stuff. I am still hoping for some creative docking options. A dock with Ethernet, a few Type A ports, power delivery, and a hard disk would be useful for backups of the laptop itself, for example. I also think that we will see more things trend toward being wireless. Canon and Nikon have offered wireless transfer functionality on their professional cameras for years, and so I imagine this functionality will start being built in and becoming better.
Western Digital already sells a portable USB hard disk that has a battery, a wifi radio, and an SD card reader. You can connect it directly to a system (and, I have considered getting one for use with the Surface 3) or you can put it somewhere and connect to it as a NAS, either by joining both your client computer and the disk to the same wireless network, or by joining your client computer to a wireless network the disk hosts. That configuration could be useful in a field scenario where multiple people use the system to share transfer data. A tool like that works with whatever computer you have today, works without any adapters or cable on a new computer that doesn't have a normal USB Type A port, and will perform the functions of both an SD card reader and an external hard disk using a new Type C to Micro USB 3.0 B cable. It's not hard to imagine Western Digital will build the next version of this device with a Type C connector.
There will be switching costs, but I don't think that the ecosystem is in anywhere near as much trouble as people claim it is. I think that the opportunity to improve the experience of certain devices massively (I'm looking at you, Surface Pro) by including two or three USB ports instead of three separate ports that each only do one thing) is highly enticing. I don't think we should overlook the idea that a future Surface Pro with three Type C ports might be much more easily able to run an external hard disk and a full-sized media reader at the same time(3), making it that much more viable for things like a photo management workflow in a way that you "can" today using a USB 3.0 hub, but probably shouldn't. You either need a powered disk or to commit to a powered hub (or both, at least with the Surface 3, which struggles providing a whole lot of power out of its single 3.0 port.)
I do think that it may have been better if Apple had packed at least one USB Type C to Type A adapter in the box, but suggestions like that are kind of a slippery slope, because Apple might also have included one of the MultiPort adapters, and a Lightning to Type C cable, and a Magic Mouse (which would justify the lightning cable) and so on. Of course, Apple makes those things available, but doesn't itself bundle that accommodation.
The other thing is that I think this whole thing will be an awful lot less damaging than when Apple removed floppy diskette drives from its systems. That, coupled with data that people were collecting becoming bigger anyway, and there being no clear, widely deployable, inexpensive replacement that would be a reasonably universal way to move data around meant that it suddenly became very difficult to do things like write an essay on a computer in your room and print it on a computer in the living room, or give a few music files to a friend. In the late '90s and early 2000s, it was hard, if not impossible to use Internet services for these tasks (not to mention impractical) and if you bought into a storage ecosystem such as that of a drive like Zip 100, LS-120/Superdisk, or something similar, then you weren't guaranteed that your friends and acquaintances had the same drive. If you bought an external one, you could take it to their house, if their computer had the same connector yours did.
I know the impact for me was that I had little computing islands. My Macintosh Performa 600 and Quadra 840av could share data, via either a LocalTalk connection through their serial ports or with floppy diskettes, and those two could share with my parents' Windows PC, but none of those things could share with my iMac, for which we didn't have any USB peripherals or other adapters. Those things were available, but they didn't always help. A USB floppy diskette drive could run you $100 or more over the retail cost of the machine. A USB Type C to Type A adapter or a new cable for a peripheral is $9, presuming you even need it, between wireless and networked printers, and online storage services that can quickly be used to transfer files from machine to machine or person to person.
What was even more annoying is that my parents' computer did have an internal ZIP100 drive. I had my own disk and I eventually inherited a Parallel port drive for a PC I had, but it wouldn't be for several years after I had gotten rid of that iMac that I ever came across a USB zip drive. I still haven't ever used a SCSI one. Making that investment at the time would have made a material change in how I used all of those computers, and I'd probably still have a lot of my data from that time period today if I'd had that kind of tool available. (Of course, what I really wanted was to put Ethernet in everything and to run a Windows NT 4.0 server, but I failed to get funding for Ethernet cards, a hub or switch, and cabling in the same way I failed to get funding for ZIP or other larger removable media.)(4)
When the time comes for me to start using Type C computers and peripherals, I'll buy adapters and cables, and new peripherals I get will be designed with Type C in mind, and I'll make do. It won't fundamentally change my life, even as somebody who had previously heavily advocated for highly expandable machines with disk bays and slots and a wide variety of different ports, all "just in case."
The world has changed, and our computers should probably follow.
Endnotes:
- On the 13-inch MacBook Pro with the Touch Bar, the particular Intel platform Apple is using does not have enough PCI Express lanes for both Alpine Ridge controllers they use to be fully equipped. The ports on one side of the system are only capable of half the performance of those on the other side.
Also: the 12-inch MacBook Pro lacks an Alpine Ridge, so it can use USB Type C devices, but not ThunderBolt 3 ones.
- In 1993, the Apple AudioVision monitor provided a one-cable connection for video, ADB (keyboard/mouse) and sound to a Mac. The AV Power Macintoshes in 1994 were supposed to add some video input lines for use with conferencing cameras. The cable was completely massive. In 1996-7, the AppleVision monitors carried ADB/Sound/Video on a single smaller cable, using all normal connectors. In the early 2000s, ADC carried digital video, USB, and power for the monitor over a single cable. After that, Cinema displays had a single cable carrying USB, DVI video, and Firewire. After that, the mDP and Thunderbolt monitors added a Magsafe laptop charger for "docking."
- I should note that Seagate recently announced a line of desktop USB 3.0 hard disks that have a USB hub in them. I have an 8TB example, but that's an SMR disk and is unsuitable to things like video editing or managing a photo library.
- A large part of that of course was that I was literally a child, and I don't think I was good at expressing that I was using the machines for productivity. I was also very low on floppy diskettes, nor did I have any archival software to effectively use floppies to transfer more than a single meg of data.