This is just a timing issue. You can already get every device like mice, keyboards, headsets etc with USB C. If you've never seen one, perhaps you're not getting out enough.

I don't know many people who obsessively replace things like keyboards and mice. Like I said I'm sure they exist, but I've never seen one in the wild. Maybe I don't hang with that kind of very boring nerd, only the interesting kind of nerd. Also, I can walk into a local shop and get a keyboard with USB-A within an hour, or order a variety of specialised keyboards with USB-A.

well done, you're a hipster outlier and that has nothing to do with anyone other than 3 people anymore

Huh so in your mind industrial engineers with actual jobs are hipsters now? Hey, news for you, bucko, half of the industrial kit out there runs with MODBUS over RS485, and not jut the old stuff. Maybe if you had an actual job rather than obsessively upgrading keyboads with the allowance your mum chucks down into the basement, you'd know this. And literally all the USB controllers I have are USB-A

Do you wish to continue trading insults?

If you want to use decades old tech, congrats, you get a dongle.

Nothing better than double dongling it! That's what I want in a new laptop, inconvenience!

Stick them on the end of each USB cable/device, they're a few mm long, you won't even notice.

Well I will when it goes missing. Not everyone has a new desktop, laptop or even PC (yeah raspberry pis get more than enough industrial use). Sooner or later that dongle will get pulled off the device, so I either have to remember to carry my own when I take my laptop to the workshop or go hunting.

Or... I buy a laptop with the ports I use on a regular basis.

I'm not exactly Gen Z. It would be idiocy for me, or you, or anyone, to be insisting on USB A devices now

So your rebuttal to my point is... to completely invent a different point that I didn't make? Smooth. It's not about new deices it's about not having ports on new laptops for all the existing devices still out there and also still being made new. And of course having the convenience of immediate compatibility with billions of extant, non obsolete devices.

(and that's because they're bluetooth - god you're going to be furious when you hear about that)

The only reason you think I'd be furious is you've written some sort of bizarre fanfic about me where me wanting USB-A ports on a laptop to use the plethora of devices I have without fucking with dongles means I'm somehow deeply opposed to anything newer than USB 1.1, presumably. Hard to tell what's in your head-canon to be honest since USB-2 post dates bluetooth by quite a margin.

It's be much more like having weirdos like you ranting about how stupid and ludditey it is that bluetooth 5 is backards compatible with 4 and I should just buy a bluetooth 4 dongle or better yet chuck all my bluetooth 4 and earlier kit and replace it with 5 (even though bluetooth 5 keyboards are very very rare) because all must be sacrificed on the alter of newness.

Because apparently wanting a USB-A port on a new laptop for convenience really triggers about half the people on this forum.

On the flip side financial reporting should be a far less of burden today in the era of fully electronic accounting and enterprise resource planning, then it was in the 70s.

Considering the distribution of reports is also mostly digital where are these savings coming from?

I am hardly the last person to defend Trump or his administration around here but 'savings' does not seem to be the story here. I don't really have an opinion on this call as if it is right or wrong. I can see some arguments being made a long the lines of it would give corporate leaders more time to show a strategy works before they have to 'face the shareholders' and that might enable more strategic thinking or even lower market volatility; but cost savings hard to see it.

Without commenting on if moving a to a semiannual cycle is good or bad you're telling me corporate boards, and the C-suites are not going to take the calls of funds managers at big institutional investors but are going to pick up the phone because Zuck/Besos/Gates/Musk is on the line...

I don't buy it.

Well that's the thing, USB C offers very little over A for those.

You don't need the faster data rates (5GBPs is sufficient for a keyboard IMO), you don't need lots of power, and they're probably more often used with desktops which have a surfeit of A ports and a lack of C ports.

Plus C too A dongles exist but I gather the reverse isn't officially supported.

It's going away eventually but what should I "rip off the bags aid" just so I can fuck around with dongles and see no improvement to literally anything I do?

Charging will go away eventually which I'm fine with, but I'm not going to replace things just because they charge from a different port. I'm not going to replace my keyboards or mice. I'm not going to replace most of my usb sticks. Etc etc etc. Yes I can get millions of dongles, orrrr I could just keep buying laptops with a good selection of ports and put off dealing with this until the laptop breaks and I need a new one.

I don't want to spend a bunch of money on a laptop and then dongle up so a transition that I just don't really care about happens marginally sooner.

My big boy pants will prefer manufacturers like Lenovo rather than people aggressively chasing the newest stuff for no especially good reason. I'm not complaining about keeping old shit years past it's best but at home and work I have quite a lot of usb A stuff.

You are utterly delusional. Many of the roads prepare predate cars.

And we both know the reason you can't be bothered to address the rebuttals to the points you made is because you know you're full of shit and your only twisting tactic is to act lofty because reality, facts and logic have proven you wrong.

You are driving dangerously. When you wrap yourself around the back of a tractor don't come crying to me. But I'm sure you'll argue the tractor shouldn't have been there because really the roads were built for you personally to drive dangerously.

You appear to be arguing that the ThinkPad carbon X1 is a bloated laptop. This seems to be an odd position to take for a 1.1kg high end laptop. Or maybe you are making stuff up about USB A bloating laptops.

I didn't say it wasn't possible, I said it's annoying. I personally prefer a laptop today minimizes fucking around of I spend a lot of money on it. Yes I can but an adapter. I can then also buy the little steel cables and clamp thing so it doesn't get lost when someone unplugged the dongle because they wanted to use the adapter in their older laptop. But it's all faff for no reason except fashion chasing.

But you know nothing improves and expensive, thin, light laptop with a long battery life ike a bag of half a dozen dongles.

I know solutions exist, but I have a bunch of peripherals and use my laptop in different places. Yes I can but a bag of cheap adapters and spam then wherever I go to make my laptop more useable, but given how common usb A stuff still is, why make a nice expensive laptop less convenient on some sort of point of principle?

Fortunately good quality laptops like Lenovo carbon series usually come with plenty of A and C ports.

GDP is probably not the right measure to look AI's economic impact. There might not be a better one but if you make the same amount of things without workers, very often one of the highest input cost, the market is certain to re-value those things. Fewer dollars will but more of them. Productivity increases without accompanying outlets for increased consumption is deflationary.

Economics is hard because nothing happens in total isolation. A lot of companies have yet to pass on tariff costs. Is AI productivity funding their continued reliance on foreign sourced inputs rather than driving them to stand up domestic alternatives and/or raise consumer prices? Could be part of it.

Or maybe the AI boom just isn't real. ML isn't new, it is already doing the QA on your sandwhich cookies and has been for couple decades almost. Maybe all the "hotness" that is LLMs by the time capital investments are made, the energy to run them is paid for just, and what other associated costs are not being properly accounted for just are not as competitive with human workers as believed.

I am sorry that is *worst* option.

Force users to look for tiny little icons next to otherwise identical ports to know what its actual capabilities are, and worse create situations where incorrectly selected ports silently just deliver performance orders of magnitude slower but cause no error to be reported to a user who might not know what to expect from a given device and even realize they are not getting the performance they could be.

The 'universal' part of USB is important the whole black/red/blue 1.x,2.x,3.x except when it isn't situation on USB-A ports is plenty bad enough.

Yep because the thing I love about a laptop is the bag of dongles needed to make it work.

I have a laptop with USB-A, USB-C and HDMI ports and they all get a fair amount of use. I've never actually seen a USB-C mouse or keyboard in the wild. I am sure they exist but they're relatively rare. There's still a ton of USB-A storage around and it's still useful, and I still use it for a few things (not everything is in the cloud). I'm also yet to encounter a USB-C/RS485 adapter. Oh and USB micro-B is still in the long tail of existence and while C to micro B cables certainly exist they are not nearly so common and bags of the A type exist,

So yes, I could also carry round a bag of dongles, but having the top 4 ports (3.5mm 4 lyfe) on a laptop enhances the portability, given they all get plenty of use for many people.

They don't really teach the history of Marxist failures either. "Communism has never been tried" yes it was, they actually really did try to do away with money, the Communists abandoned "real Communism" right away because it was not working.

You are not going to "to each according to his needs" your way out of this latest technical revolution anymore than you could past industrial revolutions. It won't work. People still need actual things like food, shelter, transportation and nobody is going to provide this stuff just for the pure joy of drywall well hung, or a cattle stall well mucked, similarly generative AI isnt going to do these things either. Don't say robots, that is also not going to be economical viable in this revolutionary cycle.

So no there are not 'two classes' there are at least three, capital owners, white-collar professionals, and everyone else. Everyone else will be just fine and carry on pretty much business as usual, its only group #2 that we are going to see decimated. You've grown up in a world where desk jobs/knowledge work was/is seen as aspirational career direction, you're so stuck in this view you're concocting wild tales of social unrest because you simply can't imagine where the high school guidance councilors are talking kids into becoming auto mechanics and handy-men/women.

It isn't just politics though or its why everything has to be shoved into one of two political platforms in the use (a few more in others) no matter how inconsistent or unrelated to the other planks assigned to that platform, take your pick.

People are wired to seek validation. What social media fundamentally does is connect a like-minded bunch of people however small a minority they might be, which lets them feel their wildest most disordered, anti-social thoughts actually enjoy some wide acceptance. They get their dopamine hit from someone agreeing with them, their brains cement their thinking along these lines because of that reward.

People used to try out their crank ideas on all their family, friends, colleagues, fellow congregants etc, and if they were unable to find any validation of them eventually let go and trained their brains on something 'acceptable'.

So society and many individuals can't discard any idea anymore no matter how stupid, disordered, dangerous, counter factual, etc it may be. Maybe this wider exchange of ideas means something notions, interests, theories, etc that are harmless or even good survive when in days past they would have either been extinguished or stayed in the domain of handfuls of cranks exchanging chain letters but it sure looks like the net effect is a lot of bad ideas and individual ideations get more oxygen because of social media than real innovative positives ones.

Yeah but you have to be very careful to define what is and isn't algorithmic.

I know it's when I see it, but in a technical sense, selecting posts by people you have followed and displaying them in reverse chronological order is an algorithm. In addition spam filtering is an algorithmic process and one it's essentially impossible to eschew.