It'll probably be a few years, and it'll probably start with the front ports and hubs before the rear ports start to get changed over. USB's got 20 years of devices to support, and a lot of people would rather not have to get all new cables for their existing devices. Though I do foresee that things like mice and keyboards will ship with A<->C dongles for a few years, much like the USB<->PS/2 adapters of 15 years ago.
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.
There's always pain after a USB spec gets released. This has been pretty much par since USB 1.0 - switch chips were flaky back then, USB drives were quirky and getting them working on anything other than a specific version of Windows was a crapshoot, etc.
Eventually all-in-one chips get less buggy, cable manufacturing gets cheaper and we move on to the next spec level and repeat.
USB is a mess. Lots of devices that claim support are actually way out of spec. As a result it is hard to say exactly what will happen when people start plugging stuff in.
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).
The cynic in me sometimes enjoys the irony of watching USB become the fragmented ecosystem of loosely (or not) compatible interconnects that it was designed to replace.
(ok, it's not quite /that/ bad, but you get the sentiment)
Five years ago I would have been eagerly anticipating this, but I can't really get excited anymore. USB3 has probably already won, and while I love the idea of monitors and other devices all using the same port, I don't think it will be enough to drive adoption.
And USB being the cheapest option is the main reason why we finally have a connector and almost all hardware can agree on. Remember that even the fact that the original USB plug is not symmetrical is to due to cost savings - if they added four extra wires for symmetry, we might still not have USB everywhere.
You make a lot of fair points, but I think this is off the mark:
> Proprietary connectors that change every couple of years?
Is there any connector in particular you are thinking of that has been cycled out in just two years? All the ones I can think of lasted at least most of a decade. Some such as USB and the 30-pin connector lasted much, much longer than that (the 30-pin connector honestly lasted a long time for how crappy it was).
Tbf I think the most prevalent issue with USB was from people plugging them in where they cannot see the port properly, ie the back of a computer tower (most often) or back of TV/console etc.
Not really sure that that's USB's fault so much as a lack of front USB ports. I think in those cases the consumer can chose to get some sort of hub that's easier to access/can be pulled out from behind their setup.
Now that C exists though, idk if we really need to go much further. Connector much smaller than it is now will become fragile.
I've always thought they could add a single fiber core to USB cables for some "ultra high speed" standard, since USB4 is predicted to top out at 80GBps, but we could get 50Tbps or so over a single fiber if we really needed to.
But after owning several fiber cables, for networking and HDMI fiber based cables...yeah they're far, far too weak to replace copper. Just look at 'em wrong and they snap/break.
Plus tbf if we get 80gbps from usb4...the problem then becomes that we don't reaaaally have a use case for that speed. Maybe network adaptors, but beyond that...I mean a modern SSD will saturate that with a sequential read I suppose, but still.
There was a really short timeframe when I was really positive about USB, but that has been long lost since.
They should've never allowed cables to only provide some capabilities and still get the branding. Having capabilities for connectors was fine imo, but also accepting them with cables was bad because you cannot really find out what it supports and where the issue originates of something goes wrong
I agree that that will be the most likely outcome, but I wish it wasn't going to be that way.
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