Macs with USB but no SCSI connector were a big cause of complaints where I was back then (I worked around lots of designers with SCSI Syquest and Zip drives, and all their client archives of high-res photoshop and page layout work on them), and _everybody_ in my circles thought Apple were insane for leaving floppy drives off... (These were a long time back though...)

To be clear, I remember those transitions being very smooth, but I was a Windows user. The first machine I bought without a floppy drive was my laptop in 2005 when CD-RW had long since replaced floppies on the Sneakernet.

My school was mostly iMac G3s and I vaguely recall the lack of a floppy drive being annoying once or twice, but the Windows machines had floppy drives and you could easily share files on the network, so it was never a big deal.

Heh - my school had AppleIIs and BBC Micros. My first year at Uni we used a VAX 11/780. I guess we had somewhat different experiences.

On the other hand, I think the most impressive and smoothest transitions I've ever seen in the entire personal computer space were Apple's transition from 68K to PowerPC processors, and almost as smooth their transition from PowerPC to X86. I'm still incredibly impressed with the attention to detail they showed getting those major changes to work so smoothly for users.

> I don't recall being annoyed by those changes. In particular, the VGA->DVI transition was handled really well. Just about everything was DVI-I and would accept a VGA signal over a DVI cable, so you just bought a VGA->DVI cable and continued using VGA.

Just about everything was USB-C and would accept a USB-A signal over a USB-C cable, so you just bought a USB-C->USB-A cable and continued using USB-A.

I don't see a difference. Except the part where you say the transition was handled well. I didn't feel good applying that to USB-C...

There are a lot of USB devices that do not attach via a cable. You can't just use a different cable in that case, because you were not using one to begin with.

VGA devices always connected via a cable, so you weren't adding bulk. Even adapters for devices with integrated cables (grrr...) were pretty minor compared to the sheer heft of the VGA cable itself.

So do we just stick with USB-A forever?

Until the person who happens to be complaining personally upgrades their USB-A peripherals.

So basically a “dongle?”

No dongle at all. Just a different cable. The adapter cables are fine. It's the devices that aren't attached via cables that are awkward.