About Apple, USB C and standards

I’ve been thinking about the recent, apparently insane product releases from Apple – an iPhone that doesn’t have a headphone jack although a significant usage case for an iPhone is to play music from iTunes, a Macbook that has only one port, for both charging and data, and that port is basically incompatible with the rest of IT industry unless you use adapters, and a Macbook Pro that has only those incompatible ports, has less battery capacity, doesn’t have an SD card slot although its supposedly main target user group are the creative professionals, like photographers and videographers, who use SD cards to transfer images and video from their cameras when they are in the field and don’t have a cable with them.

To add insult to injury, all those products are more expensive than the previous, more functional generation.

I tried to think of an explanation, and I came up with several possible ones. For instance, although Apple pays formal lip service to the creative professionals, they don’t really make that much money from those. When Apple actually did make most of its money from creative professionals, somewhere in the 1990s, they were almost bankrupt and Microsoft had to rescue them by buying half a billion dollars of non-voting shares, and Steve Jobs was re-instated as iCEO (interim-CEO, which is the likely cause of him deciding to i-prefix all the product names). They then started to market to a wider audience of young hipsters, students and wealthy douchebags (as well as those who wanted to be perceived as such), and soon they started to drown in green. Yes, they continued to make products intended for the professionals, but those brought them increasingly smaller proportion of their overall earnings, and were deprioritized by the board, which is basically interested only in the bottom line. And it is only logical – if hipsters who buy iPhones bring you 99% of your money, you will try your best to make them happy and come back for more. The 1% earnings you get from the professional photographers and video editors are, essentially, a rounding error. You could lose them and not even notice. As a result, the Mac Pro got updated with ever decreasing frequency and was eventually abandoned by the professional market which is highly competitive and doesn’t have the time to waste on half a decade obsolete underperforming and overpriced products.

Keeping the hipsters happy, however, is a problem, because they want “innovation”, they want “style”, they basically want the aura of specialness they will appropriate from their gadget, since their own personality is a bland facsimile of the current trends. They are not special, they are not innovative, they are not interesting and they are not cool, but they want things that are supposed to be all that, so that they can adorn themselves with those things and live in the illusion that their existence has meaning.

So, how do you make a special smartphone, when every company out there has something that has all kinds of perfectly functional devices, within the constraint of modern technology? They have CPU and GPU that are slammed right against the wall of the thermal design, they have superfluous amounts of memory and storage, excellent screens… and there’s nothing else you can add to such a device, essentially, unless there’s a serious breakthrough in AI, and those gadgets become actually smart, in which case they will tell you what to do, instead of the other way around. So, facing the desperate need to appear innovative, and at the time facing the constraints of modern technology which defines what you can actually do, you start “inventing” gimmicky “features” such as the removal of the headphone jack and USB A sockets, and you make a second screen on the keyboard that draws a custom row of touch-sensitive icons.

And apparently, it works, as far as the corporate bottom line is concerned. The professionals noise their displeasure on YouTube, but the hipsters are apparently gobbling it all up, this stuff is selling like hot cakes. The problem is, the aura of coolness of Apple products stems from the fact that the professionals and the really cool people used them, and the hipsters wanted to emulate the cool people by appropriating their appearance, if not the essence. If the cool people migrate to something else, and it becomes a pattern for the hipsters to emulate, Apple will experience the fate of IBM. Remember PS/2? IBM decided it’s the market leader and everybody will gobble up whatever they make, so they made a PS/2 series of computers with a closed, proprietary “microchannel” bus, trying to discourage 3rd party clones. What happened is that people said “screw you”, and IBM lost all significance in the PC market, had to close huge parts of its business and eventually went out of the retail PC business altogether. And it’s not that PS/2 machines were bad. Huge parts of the PC industry standard were adopted from it – the VGA graphics, the mouse and keyboard ports, the keyboard layout, the 3.5” floppy standard, plus all kinds of stuff I probably forgot about. None of it helped it avoid the fate of the dinosaurs, because it attempted to blackmail and corner the marketplace, and the marketplace took notice and reacted accordingly.

People like standardized equipment. They like having only one standard for the power socket, so that you can plug any electrical appliance and it will work. The fact that the power socket can probably be designed as better, smaller and cooler is irrelevant. The most important thing about it is that it is standard, and you can plug everything everywhere. USB type A is the digital equivalent of a power socket. It replaced removable media, such as floppy and CD discs, with USB thumb drives, which can be plugged into any computer. Also, keyboards, mice, printers, cameras, phones, tablets, they all plug into the USB socket, and are universally recognized, so that everything works everywhere. Today, a device without a USB port is a device that cannot exchange massive amounts of data via thumb drives. It exists on an island, unable to function effectively in a modern IT environment. It doesn’t matter that the USB socket is too big, or that it’s not reversible. Nobody cares. What’s important is that you can count on the fact that everybody has it. Had Apple only replaced the Thunderbolt 2 sockets with USB C sockets, and kept the USB A sockets in place, it would be a non-issue. However, this has a very good chance of becoming their microchannel. Yes, people are saying that the USB C is the future, and it’s only a matter of time before it’s adopted by everyone, but I disagree. The same was said before about FireWire and about Thunderbolt. Neither standard was widely adopted, because it proved more easy to just make the USB faster, than to mess with another standard which basically tries to introduce yet another port that will not work anywhere else. There’s a reason why it’s so difficult for the Anglo-Saxon countries to migrate from Imperial units to the SI. Once everybody uses a certain standard, the fact that it is universally intelligible is much more important than its elegance.

Recognize those ports? Yeah, me neither.

Recognize those ports? Yeah, me neither.

Yes, we once used the 5.25” and 3.5” floppy drives and we no longer do. We once used the CD and DVD drives and we no longer do. We once used the Centronics and RS-323 ports for printers and mice. We once used MFM, RLL, ESDI and SCSI hard disk controllers. We once used the ISA system bus and the AGP graphics slot. What used to be a standard no longer is. However, there are standards that are genuinely different, such as the UTP Ethernet connector, or the USB connector, or the headphone jack, or the Schuko power socket. USB and Ethernet and PDF and JPEG and HTML are some of the universal standards that make it possible for a person to own a Mac, because you can plug it into the same peripherals as any other computer. It makes the operating differences unimportant, because you can exchange files, you can use the same keyboard and mouse, you can use the same printer, you can plug into the same network. By removing those standard connections and ways to exchange data with the rest of the world, a Mac becomes an isolated device, a useless curiosity, like the very old computers you can’t really use today because you can no longer connect them to anything. Imagine what would have happened if Apple removed the USB when they first introduced FireWire, or Thunderbolt – “this new port is the future, you no longer need that old one”. Yeah. Do you think an Ethernet port is used because it’s elegant? It’s crap. The plastic latch is prone to failure or breakage, the connection isn’t always solid, the dust can get in and create problems – it’s basically crap. You know why everybody still uses it? Because everybody uses it.

4 thoughts on “About Apple, USB C and standards

  1. To tell the truth, they already tried to dictate the course of the industry when they intended to kill Adobe Flash, and they succeed at that.

    But removing standard USB was maybe too much, although one can easily buy a USB-C flash drive, and there are a lot of keyboards and mice that can be connected using BT.

    Removing Magsafe seems like a step backward though.

    And I really can’t find any excuse for the removal of an SD card reader.

    It makes me wonder, would any of those decisions would be different if Jobs was still alive.

    Overall, there is no denying they did their part in improving general standards of quality when it comes to construction quality and design.

    Also, at times they managed to pull off something that was widely misunderstood and ridiculed by the PC community, like having a 5k display connected to integrated GPU, and that shit was great. I was seriously contemplating buying Dell 5k after I saw one of those, until clunky connectivity solution put me off.

    Without Apple, I think we would be still using something like this in 2016.

    http://core0.staticworld.net/images/article/2015/06/lenovox220-100593676-orig.jpg
    http://www.zeendo.com/info/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/nokia-E5-00.png

    • I don’t disagree with what you’re saying, and I do approve of removing “standards” that are there just because nobody did anything about it, like flash, or a CD drive. However, those successful removals usually deal with things that are essentially having a problem already – flash, for instance, tends to use too much CPU and is generally a pig. A CD/DVD has limited capacity, media are prone to scratching and degradation and are unwieldy and slow. However, there’s nothing really wrong with USB 3, except that they wanted to revive the stagnant Thunderbolt which failed to gain traction in the market, and decided to shove it down everybody’s throat.
      I don’t mind USB C, as a secondary thing, a replacement for the mini display port/Thunderbolt 2 ports, not as a replacement for USB A. Every computer in my house has a USB A connector. Every computer everywhere has it. If I migrate to USB C, I’ll just isolate myself and make myself unable to exchange data with everybody else. As much as I like Apple laptops, and as much as I like the possibilities that Thunderbolt opens, such as daisychaining computers into a cluster that would pool CPU and GPU resources and deliver them on-demand within the chain, on a more practical level the ability to simply plug in a USB 3 hard drive into my laptop and copy files is orders of magnitude more important. And the trick is, I really would have liked the new Macbook Pro had they simply replaced the Thunderbolt 2 with USB C, put in the new improved LCD and left everything else alone.

      • I can understand your frustration, but most of those problems can still be easily solved, like buying micro-USB to USB-C cable and you can still connect your HDD to any machine. Also, most of the new flash drives have USB-C and USB-A, so you can plug it on both ends and have some crossover solution.

        What annoys me much more than these occasionally miss-hits are general trends.

        It’s like, if you wanted to buy yourself a cookie ten of fifteen years ago, you’d just go into a supermarket and buy yourself a cookie.

        If you want to do it today, you would just stand in front of the shelf and be surrounded by fifty different shapes and flavors of cookies, and to get a discount on one, you would have to have MultiShit card, but if you want another, you could get a light bulb and condoms for free. Third one already comes in a package of 3, but you can’t use the MultiShit card discount on those, except if you want to buy watermelon together with it. Uggghhh, I don’t want any cookies, just leave me alone, I wanna go home, I don’t know what I want anymore.

        Same thing happens with technology, and this is what I appreciate about Apple, they do my work for me. I don’t want to have too many choices, my only choice is a high quality product, well build and all-round functional. I’d leave building PCs from scratch for kids, same thing goes for customising mobile phone interfaces and things like that. The world is just becoming too complex, so if you want to be smart, you have to be an expert at everything, and that’s very exhausting.

        Having too many choices leads to apathy and indifference, and there is even a term for that from psychology, it’s called “the paradox of choice”.

        Also, I’ve noticed one more disturbing trend attached to this one. Everything, every new and original way of doing thing starts in the narrow circle of people who invented it, and then it slowly begins to spread to those who are maybe not quite smart enough to invent it, but sure are smart enough to use it. Then it goes even further, for everyone else, but it’s not the same thing anymore, because otherwise they wouldn’t be able to use it. But the masses are the one who dictates trends, and all that’s left of the original principles is the lowest common denominator.

        Just look at this widely accepted Disqus plugin we’re using right now. Is there any single reason why would this be any better than 20 years older Usenet? Almost any freeware Usenet reader was vastly more powerful, ergonomic and functional. It’s actually ironic it’s called “Disqus”, because it’s not meant for discussion, it’s built for writing down short, trivial thoughts, it doesn’t even support something completely rudimentary like quoting.

        Look at the music and movies made in the 80’s, and look at what we have now. No one would want to risk recording something that is unlikely to earn hundreds of millions of dollars, and you can’t do that if you don’t please the widest audience possible — so this means it has to be simple, loud and shiny. Also, you have to make it quickly, and do a sequel next year, because if you don’t, someone else will outrun you and kick you out of the business.

        I have to idea how to solve any of those problems without actually stopping the progress, I’m just nonchalantly throwing away some showerthoughts.

        • Yes, you can get new cables on ebay. Yes you can get adapters. But why? What actual useful purpose does that serve? Steve Jobs professed that the point of his philosophy of building computers was to make life easier for the customers. This isn’t it. None of it is doing anything useful for the customers, it makes their life more difficult, and for no useful purpose whatsoever. It simply became more difficult to connect shit to the laptop, and that’s all there is to it. It’s a functional downgrade. With a new Macbook Pro, in order to connect your existing external drives, camera and monitor you need adapters and new cables. With the older model, you just plug it all in and everything works. No additional purchases, no hassle, just plug standard shit into a standard port and it works.
          I am kind of a geek in a sense that I make my own computers, I tear the laptops down to clean them up and change the thermal paste on the CPU and stuff, and I like having a certain degree of proficiency in those things because it gives me independence. I like Apple’s laptops more than I like their desktops, not aesthetically, because they are all sleek and nice, but because their desktops don’t work for me – I have too much dust here that would clog up the vents and those things are a bitch to tear down and clean. Also, I would have to use an external storage unit instead of having the drives inside the case, so, a standard PC is much more convenient for me as a desktop. Laptops, however, are another matter, and here I prefer Apple. I almost never see my desktop machine, it sits under the desk and I interact only with the monitor, keyboard and mouse, but a laptop, it’s an all-in-one package, and Apple makes those very much to my liking. I had one for five years, did loads of stuff with it and it’s the best laptop I ever had, and I had quite a few. So, when they fuck up their laptop line, it’s kind of personal for me. 🙂

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