One more counterexample: nano SIM cards. The move to micro SIM cards was wonderful and well-timed, everyone followed Apple within a year or two because the spacing savings were obvious.

In contrast, the nano SIM card has been around since the iPhone 5 came out in 2012, but cheap smart phone (think Samsung J-something[1]) still use micro SIM cards. Pointless fragmentation to save a millimeter.

If Apple wants to drop legacy cruft, how about they start with 5400rpm hard drives??!

[1] https://www.gsmarena.com/samsung_galaxy_j2_(2017)-8900.php

>Counterexamples to your claim: Thunderbolt? Magsafe? Magsafe2? The physical escape key?

How are any of those counterexamples? Thunderbolt wasn't dropped and most users don't care a single bit about Magsafe and/or the physical escape key.

Sorry, should have been clearer. What I meant:

Power: Magsafe 1 being incompatible with Magsafe 2, which is in turn incompatible with USB-C. No drastic improvement in either.

Data: Thunderbolt 1 and 2 were at least port compatible. Thunderbolt 3 is the same thing as USB-C, so the cable won't fit and you have to buy an adapter, so in effect thunderbolt was dropped. I get that it's a different story internally, but from my perspective, it's again frustrating.

Anyway, at face value, I'm happy that they /finally/ decided to collaborate with everyone else and agreed on an industry-standardized connector, but damn. Even then, I keep reading horror stories re: cable compatibility for USB-C because the standard is so complex. Oh well, it'll settle eventually.

Anyway, none of this bothers me as much as headphones specifically, which cost a lot of money, last decades, and aren't a throwaway item like adaptors and cables. So if you're going to make me change them or use an annoying dongle, there had better be an excellent reason :-(

Please check your facts before using words like "finally". Thunderbolt was a collaboration as well; it just seems like it was a proprietary Apple thing because Apple pushed it earlier and harder than everyone else. The same is true of the beloved USB-A, of course, which was pushed earlier and harder by Apple than by PC makers too.

Anyway, make up your mind. Are you furious that Apple had the courage to adopt a standard like USB-C, or are you happy? Choose one. :)

> Thunderbolt was a collaboration as well

As far as I understand, Intel co-developed Thunderbolt with Apple on their own. The standard was published, but this isn't the same as an open and public collaboration the way other standards are, e.g. USB has the USB Implementers Forum, which is a consortium of companies. Plus, they used to charge royalties, and only recently did intel make the standard royalty-free. Good for them for doing that.

To me it looks like they did what they wanted on their own, then eventually slapped it on top of the existing USB-C standard when it didn't get much adoption elsewhere. I don't know why Apple would care about that in the slightest, but I can imagine Intel does.

> Anyway, make up your mind. Are you furious that Apple had the courage to adopt a standard like USB-C, or are you happy? Choose one. :)

Why? Can't it be both? I'm happy that they found the "courage" now, but unhappy that they found it after floundering through a bunch of different options first. I'm also unhappy that they took away my darned headphone jack in the process :-)

I'm still bummed about losing Magsafe!

However, I am very glad that I can now charge my laptop with pretty much any USB charger* and a cheap cable. I consider not having to buy $88 replacement chargers a huge win.

*Yes, even the tiny iPhone brick can charge my MacBook, albeit very, very slowly.

If you really are at risk, (thinking of when I had small kids running around the house) maybe consider one of the Belkin "BreakSafe" magnetic adapters? Yeah, you'll have a nub sitting on the outside of the machine, but it might be worthwhile.

https://griffintechnology.com/us/breaksafe-magnetic-usb-c-po...

Early on Apple shipped with a thunderbolt connector that the rest of the industry ended up not using. Any tech purchased around that connector was deprecated when the machine it was to connect to was upgraded.

IIRC there were very few devices with a hard-wired cable on the device end. So for them it was just a new cable or if not, then a permanently-attached dongle. That doesn't mean the device itself is obsolete.

I still have a FW800-Thunderbolt adapter...

Magsafe is a lifesaver if you have kids/pets. I even tripped the wire sometimes. I understand the appeal of a single cable for power/data but Magsafe was great.