Wow, somehow this escaped me all these years. I feel like I’ve got a bunch of fresh XKCD to read now.
For the uneducated: On a mobile browser you just press and hold the comic (long tap). On a computer you hover over the image and the alt text will appear next to the cursor.
The alt text in this one was:
spoiler
Fortunately, the charging one has been solved now that we've all standardized on mini-USB. Or is it micro-USB? Shit.
This is the reason I was super hyped by the synergy of the fediverse, all the support and use of activity pub. And god I hope Facebook doesn't ruin it. This community has grown so rapidly and organically, I just wanna see it continue to thrive.
I feel like this is almost where Apple is ahead of the game. Despite the EU hating it, they've been using the same lightning cable design for a long old time because it works well enough, it doesn't suffer USB-A's put it in 3 times to figure out which direction is right, and people have a billion of them laying around at this point.
USB C is the way to go. It works with most devices from most manufacturers. The only people left out are Apple users and cheap devices still using USB mini/micro
I mean, sure, it works... But USBC would also just work. They already use it on their laptops (with them being huge proponents of thunderbolt and USBC), and iPads.
Except it's a proprietary piece of junk stuck on USB 3.1 (and I love my thunderbolt connectors too much to let it slide), that can't offer proper power delivery because of power pin literally burning out.
The only thing they did good is fixing the need to check cable orientation before inserting it (yes, you don't have to try three times, you can just actually use your eyes, USB-A connector's orientations can easily be told apart just by two square thingies on each of it's sides).
But as USB-C came out two years later, it wiped the floor with lightning. Anyone saying otherwise is either insane, didn't read the specs or purposefully misleading you. And only now Apple is switching over. Freaking 7 years later. Though, not because they realize how inferior their connector is, but because they were made to.
Speaking as an Apple user - I am heavily invested in their ecosystem - I am extremely happy that Lightning is on death’s door. I fully agree with the EU and I am very grateful to them for forcing Apple’s hand.
That being said, your point about USB-A falls apart when you consider any situation where your vision is even partially obstructed. Such as; back of the computer, back of your monitors, a dock unless you’re holding it, etc etc.
What I’m hoping will happen:
Apple sells only USB-C to USB-C cables
Apple users start requesting more USB-C ports on motherboards / desktop computers
Mouse/Keyboard manufacturers produce USB-C alternatives of their products
Motherboards move even more to USB-C
GOTO 3 until USB-A becomes as legacy as VGA or PS/2
We hopefully never see another single orientation external cable ever again.
There’s an argument to be made that by maintaining the Lightning connector, Apple can control and profit from the ecosystem of accessories that support their devices. This includes licensing fees from the Made for iPhone (MFi) program, which manufacturers must join to produce Lightning-compatible accessories. While user experience may be a consideration, Apple’s decision also likely has financial incentives.
Yeah, in such a situation you should always try to compare the standards, look at the userbases and suddenly there are only very few that actually make sense. If everyone just does this, one standard will eventually crystalise as the one to use (or at least depending on the situation). Character encoding is an interesting example, because nowadays (almost) everything just uses UTF-8, despite there having been many.
UTF-8 is absolutely magical in how it's backwards compatible with ASCII. Windows still uses UTF-16 which makes supporting Unicode filenames and stuff a huge pain compared to linux. At least pretty much the entire web is UTF-8.
It's bad when the actual naming scheme is more ridiculous. See USB 3.2 gen 2x1. Hopefully usb 4 simplifies things, but let's be honest, it probably won't...
I don't want a single application that just works for a few cases but doesn't work for tons of other cases. With such a world we would have a Windows OS where you need to use Face-ID for everything you want to use and sometimes just crashes and restricts the usage of something simple stupid because you don't have the magical Windows Battlepass or smth.