[daurnimator]

All of those usb specs are quite young and none have really lasted. Compared to other connectors that people may know:

- RJ45/8P8C was standardised in 1987

- the 3.5mm audio jack in 1979

- the PCI express slot from 2003

These are all still in use today. People expect to change connectors maybe twice in a lifetime, not every decade.

[samatman]

This is a brilliant illustration of survivor bias.

I sometimes wish I hadn't thinned my cable collection in the late teens, I could show you fifteen connectors which haven't lasted as long as, say, Micro-B.

[rektide]

I'd love to have something new & interesting to look forward to. It'd be so neat. I really want a fast, simple, low cost, decent power alternative, that isn't a huge jumble of old legacy specs.

Even USB4, which I love, still has dedicated old USB2 wires running around, because it's just too pre-modern to encapsulate adequately. This fact is a shot across your bow: even though USB-C is from 2014, it subsumes the previous connector. It's backward connectively compatible. The RJ45 & TRS jacks you cite are so primitive, so simple, so single-minded that of course they had no competition. There was so little to compete over, to adapt to, to grow into. A different implementation would have been irrelevant. Except, oh, even TRS/3.5mm audio had to evolve & grow to become TRRS, to add a mic channel: a case where even your immutable forever connectors aren't.

You're right that the time-scale isn't long enough to make USB-C the obvious forever connector, that the time-scales talked so far aren't that long. But digital connective technology isn't that old. We didn't have anything before, and Micro-B basically served & would keep serving, but we want more. I feel like there's an obvious huge colossal truth batting at you & you're ignoring the enormity of how clear, deliberate, & sequential this evolution has been. The fact that USB-C emerged out of the previous connector feels to me like further evidence that this is part of one continuum, that your greivance that connectors can only change once or twice is missing the clear upfront truth of the matter.

And now we're here. We spent 30 years going from crap at consumer digital systems to great, and I have a hard time seeing this as anything but the semi-final destination for us. I don't see good change as likely or probable in quite a long long long time. Perhaps lifetimes. USB-C is the final destination of mainstream computing, as far as it looks, and I merely wish it wouldn't last as many lifetimes as it seems probable to.

[kube-system]

> I don't see good change as likely or probable in quite a long long long time. Perhaps lifetimes. USB-C is the final destination of mainstream computing, as far as it looks, and I merely wish it wouldn't last as many lifetimes as it seems probable to.

We’re already well on our way to removing connectors and using Qi/WiFi/Bluetooth. I bet we’ll see phones without connectors soon.

[rektide]

For a big range of uses I think youcre right that wireless can help, that it grows. Chromecasts are great, for example, for letting us work across devices/systems. We dont need hdmi.

For video transmission i dont think there's a viable replacement. wifi6 wave 2 or wifi7 might possibly make wifi good enough. Also Im not expecting wireless power delivery to scale. It's adequate for phones but I dont think it makes sense for even mid sized laptops.