USB 3.1 sightings

[pogo]

But playing devil’s advocate it's easy to think of similar situations now which are insoluble. You connect your laptop to a printer and start printing, say. It's taking a long time and the battery running flat, but you can’t plug it in without unplugging it from the printer and cancelling the job as the only free socket is on the other side of the room. It’s easy to think of other situations, and of course I’ve been warned many times before starting an OS/firmware update that it should only be done with the laptop plugged into mains power.

The thing does have a ridiculous battery life for its size, from using very low power chips and being mostly battery internally. You have lots of time to finish tasks, lots of warning before it actually runs out. And copying files over USB 3.1 to its internal drive which maxes out at 512MB won’t take long. In the end if you are using a laptop you need to take these things into account; there will be times when you have to plug it into the mains before starting because the job might take too long, can’t be interrupted, and more power can’t be supplied without unplugging things/moving it/swapping out the battery.

[gumboot]

Haven't been paying attention and not about to start now, but are you maybe supposed to just plug power into the hard drive instead, serial bus style, and expect everything to light up at once?

[pogo]

The power brick/wall wart Apple bundle with it has a USB-C plug to supply power. If you want to plug in USB devices at the same time, and/or use a display, then Apple will sell you an adapter for $79:

Spoiler: show

That has a plug for the computer then sockets for power (via USB-C), HDMI and USB. Plug a hub into the USB port to add multiple devices.

[Little stoned kiwi]

What's the reasoning behind having one port again? It's not to save space if you end up plugging in an octopus of dongles.

[pogo]

Save space; the first MacBook Air had I think only two or three ports (though with separate power) and this is even thinner. As has been mentioned Apple expect many people to do almost everything wirelessly, and that is more or more the case: with fast wireless networks for printing, storage, bluetooth for peripherals etc.

And for most I think the dongle will stay at home, with the display and printer (say) attached to it, things you don’t normally take with a laptop. You can take the power supply if you need but with 9-10 hours battery life that can stay at home too. You can see it having certain advantages; for rapidly plugging in to a workstation, at a conference or in an office where you don't have a fixed desk, then just unplugging and plugging in one cable is faster.

Eventually it should reduce the number of adapters you need, if it becomes the de-facto standard for pretty much everything, not just drives, printers and keyboards but things like displays, power. You’ll need cables which will come with many devices. You might need a hub but this might be built into devices; its small size will make it easy to add to keyboards, hard drives, displays so they act as hubs (Apple have done this many times to their keyboards and displays).

[gumboot]

What's the reasoning behind having one port again? It's not to save space if you end up plugging in an octopus of dongles.

Might be that it's a nightmare to try to deal with the situation where somebody tries to plug a power brick into every socket to charge it faster, so they only want to support charging from one socket. Then it's a nightmare getting users to plug power into the right socket, so they only want to have one socket.

[xav]

Although it's always possible to come up with scenarios where you can exhaust the number of sockets available on any laptop, you have to admit that it's more likely when that number is only 1.

Whether it's a thumb drive, an external SSD or spinning platters, a mouse, graphics tablet, printer, audio interface, ethernet adaptor or whatever else, there are a lot of reasons why people might want to plug something into a USB socket. If you don't also use some sort of hub or multi-port dongle every single time you want to plug something in, you'll eventually reach a point where you have to unplug your sole connection in order to charge the machine. If it's just a wired mouse we're talking about then it's probably not a major issue, but for other things it could be.

Yes eventually it'll be wireless everywhere for networking, cloud storage rather than thumb drives, bluetooth for almost everything else, Miracast or similar for external displays, or native USB-C inputs on displays that also feed power back upstream.

Eventually.

We're a long way off that yet for most laptop users. We're in a transitional phase, where a second connector would have provided a lot more flexibility to deal with the fact that the real world hasn't quite caught up with Apple's vision of the future just yet.


Is that a headphone socket on the opposite side of the machine? Personally I would have dropped that in favour of a second USB-C socket, and just sold a USB audio card repackaged as a "headphone adapter" for some extortionate sum of money. And there's always Bluetooth headphones as an option. If they've already compromised by having two sockets, why not make it two multi-function ones?

[gumboot]

It's a docking station connector, isn't it. One plug and you get power, display, mouse, keyboard, 40Gpbs ethernet, printer, scanner, teledildo, all at once.

Which is what I've been expecting to be done with one of the display connectors for a decade; or if Apple were going to do it then with something proprietary... and they've gone and done it with USB instead?

[xav]

It's a docking station connector, isn't it. One plug and you get power, display, mouse, keyboard, 40Gpbs ethernet, printer, scanner, teledildo, all at once.

Which is what I've been expecting to be done with one of the display connectors for a decade; or if Apple were going to do it then with something proprietary... and they've gone and done it with USB instead?

Absolutely that's what it is. The trouble is that it's not a dedicated docking connector, so it's going to be used for other purposes when it's not being used as a docking connector, and some of those purposes are mutually incompatible with each other unless you connect via some sort of multi-port adapter. A "dock", for want of a better word

Which brings us back round to the point that you pretty much have to carry some sort of dock with you if you think you might ever need to plug in both the PSU and another USB device at the same time.


I applaud their push to use USB-C for everything, but it feels to me like the choice to only have a single socket is more about making a point than about making a practical day-to-day laptop. But then it will sell to the sort of for whom it's a primarily a symbol, rather than a practical day-to-day laptop. I guess I'm just disappointed that they chose to include an anachronistic headphone socket, when swapping that for a second USB port would have made it a practical day-to-day laptop for both and most other computer users too.

[pogo]

Which brings us back round to the point that you pretty much have to carry some sort of dock with you if you think you might ever need to plug in both the PSU and another USB device at the same time.

You just unplug the PSU. The battery lasts 9-10 hours giving you plenty of time to do pretty much anything providing the battery is charged.

Anyway, perhaps even more significant than Apple adding them to their new notebook, so has Google

https://store.google.com/product/chromebook_pixel_2015

The brand new ChromeBook has

* 2 USB Type-C (up to 5 Gbps data, 4K display out with optional HDMI or DisplayPort adapter, 60W charging)
* 2 USB 3.0 ports
* SD Card
* Headphone/Mic combo

So far more than the MacBook but then it’s not as small. It perhaps indicates how they will be used on a more standard sized laptop or PC. No need for a separate power, video or network cable just USB ports. Eventually when there are more devices and cables the USB 3.0 ports can be replaced with faster, more flexible and fully backwards compatible USB-C ports.

[xav]

Which brings us back round to the point that you pretty much have to carry some sort of dock with you if you think you might ever need to plug in both the PSU and another USB device at the same time.

You just unplug the PSU. The battery lasts 9-10 hours giving you plenty of time to do pretty much anything providing the battery is charged.

Yes, you just unplug the PSU if that's what you've got plugged into the port. My contention is that if you've got something else plugged into the port that is part of a long-running process (e.g. the file copy scenario I previously posted) you're stuffed if you run out of juice, because now you have to stop the process, remove the device, plug in a hub, plug in the PSU, plug the device back in, and finally restart the process, possibly from the beginning.

As for the battery life being sufficient, yes it's 9-10 hours. Provided it's fully charged. And hasn't lost any of its capacity over time.

For most people a new, fully charged battery is likely to be more than sufficient. But in the real world people forget to plug it in, or figure that they only used it a little bit yesterday, so there's probably enough charge for today. Or they hang onto their laptop for a few years, and the capacity diminishes. Or they start that file copy job with an hour of power left on the gauge before realising that it's going to take much longer than expected and that the external drive they've plugged in is also sucking away what power they've got left.

Anyway, perhaps even more significant than Apple adding them to their new notebook, so has Google.

Yes, as I mentioned in my first post: http://www.yakyak.org/viewtopic.php?f=3 ... 8#p1625200



Anyway we seem to be going round in circles, so I'm going to stop here. Your experience of laptop use (and presumably that of the MacBook designers) is clearly very different to mine, so a single port might never cause you a problem. I'm merely pointing out that a single port does preclude some flexibility that they could have included if they'd wanted to (and that Google did include). I think that's a shame, because it looks like a lovely device otherwise.

[pogo]

Your experience of laptop use (and presumably that of the MacBook designers) is clearly very different to mine, so a single port might never cause you a problem. I'm merely pointing out that a single port does preclude some flexibility that they could have included if they'd wanted to (and that Google did include). I think that's a shame, because it looks like a lovely device otherwise.

My experience includes both. I have in the past used laptops as my main PC on the desktop, so plugged in all sorts of cables nearly maximising port usage. But now if I or anyone else here uses a laptop it has nothing or just one thing plugged in, other than power. The one thing is usually a wired mouse but that could be replaced with Bluetooth if needed. The only other use is occasional USB sticks. We’ve never got around to setting up LAN file sharing, we just need it too rarely and are all on different OSes, so USB sticks are used, to share files for printing (the printer not being wireless) or from scanning (the printer also being a scanner).

Apple still sells laptops with more ports. In fact the MacBook Pro now is even more obviously the desktop replacement that the new MacBook isn’t, with more ports, more CPU and GPU power, more expansion options, though less battery life so it’s less suited for extended use on the road.

[Darkflame]

Bollocks to anyone putting only one port on anything. It was my biggest turn-off of Microsofts surface. Wireless is never as reliable, and a waste of power if you start using it for stuff like USB dongles.
Also dont like charging things that are never more then a foot away (mouses, wacoms) nor the idea of everything being more expensive because they need to stick wireless support in it. (memory sticks,cards and oddities like leapmotions - constantly new stuff being invented).

But I am all for better,more flexible usbs standards. 3.1 looks very nice.

Hell, If its fast enough for monitors can we go further and use it for all network cables too? Cat6<>USB3.1? A "one cable type" future?

[gumboot]

I wonder how many times you don't just plug in all the same gear every time you set up your laptop.

Maybe plugging and unplugging the Octopus of Power is actually a time saver.

[(o)(o)]

What's the reasoning behind having one port again?

Demographic targeting.

This device is limited in practical functionality.

But that doesn't mean it doesn't have a market. Less focused on power users.

Those weened on iPads and the like are used to such compromises.