I'm pretty sure no-one from the future will have a way to plug his/hers mini-USB-XC or whatever the usb name will be at the time in the future (USB standards are just a mess).
Floppy disks weren't replaced by burnable CDs, they were replaced by USB drives which didn't exist in 1994 or 1998. So the question of what was the way of the future wasn't even known when Apple removed the floppy drive.
In fact there is some parallel here; we all know that USB-C is the way of the future. Every phone, every laptop, every desktop will eventually have these ports for everything. It will replace every proprietary DC power plug. But right now, just like it was in 1998, the future isn't quite here yet.
That's pretty cool, but we're already past a few generations of devices that were supposed to store data for decades and we no longer have computer with interfaces to use them. What are the chances that people will know what USB is in 50 years?
It's also forever limited to USB2 speeds, state of the art year 2000, and can't do half the things that USB-C does. Of course that's easier to make, but don't worry, the patents notwithstanding, nobody wanted it anyway.
Don't most folks speculate they're going to abandon it within the next generation or two?
I don't want government telling me what ports I can use in my design to be frank. I get there are issues out there, but this is something that the invisible hand of the market has done a good job of culling. Remember how it used to be with every device having a wack connector?
Nowadays you can count on pretty much anything being a common variant of USB.
The USB spec was developed twenty years ago, when the computer industry looked very different and the internet barely existed for normal people. It's a suboptimal decision perpetuated by backwards compatibility, nothing more.
I can’t speak for other people, but I feel like my life is a revolving cocktail of USB Type-A, Type-B, Micro, and Type-C. I can’t just cut and re-crimp my old 2001 Sony Memory Stick USB adapter (which still has drivers available for Linux) to support USB-C.
One thing that stuck out to me about the article is that the author didn’t talk much about their use cases with USB.
The inertia the USB mini connector has in the electronics development arena has annoyed me for years. The connector was deprecated in 2007 and replaced by the rather superior and now very prevalent micro, yet builders just don't seem to want to switch.
I think the long game here is that USB will shift towards USB-C. Plenty of new Windows devices have USB-C ports, and it's only a matter of time until peripheral manufacturers transition over and the old USB ports become useless.
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