{"id":21531,"date":"2018-05-15T15:51:56","date_gmt":"2018-05-15T19:51:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/?p=21531"},"modified":"2021-05-20T11:05:17","modified_gmt":"2021-05-20T15:05:17","slug":"20-years-of-usb","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/2018\/05\/15\/20-years-of-usb\/","title":{"rendered":"20 Years of USB"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/atp.fm\/episodes\/273\">Accidental Tech Podcast<\/a> had a good segment on the many changes that USB brought and how, amazingly, peripherals for the original iMac can still be used today. I have always seen USB as a mixed bag. For the industry as a whole, it&rsquo;s certainly a success. But for a Mac user, it represents a lowest common denominator approach and a degradation of the user experience in some ways.<\/p>\n\n<p>All wired keyboards and mice can now use the same connector, and you can plug the mouse into the keyboard. That&rsquo;s great&mdash;but we had that with ADB, and ADB input devices didn&rsquo;t periodically stop working and have to be unplugged and replugged.<\/p>\n\n<p>In theory, hubs are better than daisy chaining, but finding a <a href=\"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/2012\/10\/08\/overpowered-usb-devices-underpowered-hubs\/\">USB hub that&rsquo;s reliable<\/a> is a <a href=\"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/2017\/10\/14\/the-impossible-dream-of-usb-c\/\">challenge<\/a>. Even when directly connected, nearly every USB 3 storage device I&rsquo;ve used is subject to <a href=\"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/2014\/06\/18\/rocketstor-drive-dock-more-expensive-but-reliable\/\">spontaneous unmounting<\/a>. (That never happened with SCSI.) And the availability of hubs made Apple comfortable with reducing the number of USB ports, which amongst other reasons is a problem because some USB devices <a href=\"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/2016\/10\/27\/new-macbook-pros-and-the-state-of-the-mac\/#new-macbook-pros-and-the-state-of-the-mac-update-2016-11-18\">don&rsquo;t work with hubs<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n<p>It took until at least USB 3 before it was as fast as FireWire.<\/p>\n\n<p>Hot swapping devices worked reliably with FireWire, but doing that with my <a href=\"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/2018\/02\/02\/owc-dual-drive-dock-usb-3-1\/\">new USB 3.1 drive dock<\/a> will sometimes knock other USB devices off the bus.<\/p>\n\n<p>It sounds convenient that USB-C and Thunderbolt 3 now share the same port, but this has brought USB&rsquo;s flakiness to the formerly rock solid DisplayPort. Every month or so my iMac stops recognizing my external display until I&rsquo;ve restarted a few times and plugged and replugged the connector and swapped it back and forth between the different ports. (At least I have two.)<\/p>\n\n<p>Previously: <a href=\"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/2018\/05\/03\/20-years-of-imac\/\">20 Years of iMac<\/a>.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Accidental Tech Podcast had a good segment on the many changes that USB brought and how, amazingly, peripherals for the original iMac can still be used today. I have always seen USB as a mixed bag. For the industry as a whole, it&rsquo;s certainly a success. But for a Mac user, it represents a lowest [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"apple_news_api_created_at":"2018-05-16T13:00:16Z","apple_news_api_id":"7c877978-5811-4ee9-96e9-6f0ddd1e1810","apple_news_api_modified_at":"2021-05-20T15:05:20Z","apple_news_api_revision":"AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAQ==","apple_news_api_share_url":"https:\/\/apple.news\/AfId5eFgRTumW6W8N3R4YEA","apple_news_coverimage":0,"apple_news_coverimage_caption":"","apple_news_is_hidden":false,"apple_news_is_paid":false,"apple_news_is_preview":false,"apple_news_is_sponsored":false,"apple_news_maturity_rating":"","apple_news_metadata":"\"\"","apple_news_pullquote":"","apple_news_pullquote_position":"","apple_news_slug":"","apple_news_sections":"\"\"","apple_news_suppress_video_url":false,"apple_news_use_image_component":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[2070,839,295,1297,30,174,201,175,1154],"class_list":["post-21531","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-technology","tag-anniversary","tag-displayport","tag-history","tag-imac","tag-mac","tag-storage","tag-thunderbolt","tag-usb","tag-usb-c"],"apple_news_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21531","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=21531"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21531\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":21541,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21531\/revisions\/21541"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=21531"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=21531"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=21531"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}