They'll cost 1/100 the price if every USB port in the world uses them. Auto parts for common models of cars are so incredibly cheap for a reason.

USB1 was designed in times where transistors were significantly more expensive. And in times where laptops or phones or any other situation when you disconnected peripherals were far less common. Like, it still was improvement over PS/2.

It's also not just few transistors to flip the lines around, it's also the logic to drive that

Y'all are talking as if you were in the vacuum tube era.

There were 42 million transistors in a Pentium 4, I'm sure they could have put a few thousand per USB port if they thunk optimistically instead of pessimistically.

When USB came out we already had some very crude 3D realtime rendering already at that time available to mass consumers, I'm sure we could have figured out how to flip power on a port if we put our minds to it.

Think "how can we make shit happen" instead of excuses of why it's hard.

It's by doing hard things that we got to the 80 billion transistors of modern GPUs.

> There were 42 million transistors in a Pentium 4

USB 1.1 was in '96

That's Pentium 1 era. Pentium 2 was released year after. Pentium 1 had one tenth of that

> When USB came out we already had some very crude 3D realtime rendering already at that time available to mass consumers, I'm sure we could have figured out how to flip power on a port if we put our minds to it.

Why your six neuron brain can't imagine saving pennies on chips used in cheap computer peripherals?