[numpad0]

I forgot where I read it, but there's apparently a Jobs policy of "one standard and two proprietary ports" or something, so to allow data to be ingested easily and freely shared inside Apple ecosystem, but not exported back out to the outside world with same ease.

Which is like, a great way to subsidize junk USB hubs...? But for sure they love following through with policies.

[kalleboo]

That is complete BS, Macs have never had any proprietary data ports on them. Serial, SCSI, Ethernet, USB, FireWire, Thunderbolt, USB-C have all been standards.

[astrange]

Well there was a proprietary Ethernet port for a while.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Attachment_Unit_Interfac...

[numpad0]

Apple serial port used proprietary Apple connectors.

Apple SCSI ports used nonstandard Apple connectors.

Apple Ethernet port was just Ethernet, except Macs preferred AppleTalk for networking, which was a purported competitor to Ethernet.

Apple USB port was just USB, except they were among the firsts, so it was kind of ex-proprietary.

Apple FireWire was just IEEE1394, except(combine Ethernet and USB)

Apple Thunderbolt was(combine all above)

Apple USB-C is(combine all above)

[kbolino]

What I see here is an evolution away from proprietary connectors (but I definitely agree that they strongly favored such connectors in the past). By the time of mini-DP and Thunderbolt, Apple and Intel were working jointly and the technology came to both PCs and Macs. By the time of USB-C, it was basically the entire electronics industry working together with Apple, and the end result has come to just about every kind of electronic device made by nearly every vendor. It doesn't get any less proprietary than that.

The bizarre part of the USB-C story is not Apple's involvement or early adoption of it, but rather that the mobile hardware side of Apple refused to support it. That they clung to the Lightning connector until the EU forced them to drop it, while their computer division had long since and enthusiastically adopted USB-C, is much more damning.

[kalleboo]

I still don't see your point.

Your argument was they had a rule of "one standard and two proprietary ports" as a means to "allow data to be ingested easily and freely shared inside Apple ecosystem, but not exported back out to the outside world with same ease".

For serial they used mini-DIN to save space on the back of the machine instead of a random mix of DB-25 and DE-9 on the PC side. My family and everyone I knew used a dime-a-dozen cable to use a typical PC modem, data was shared feely. There was no "one standard" port at this time to get data "ingested", serial went both ways.

Even on PCs, to do anything serial you needed hardware and driver support anyway, that was the blocker, not the shape of the port. If Apple adopted DB-26 for serial, how would that let data share more freely?

For SCSI, the DB-25 Apple used was not proprietary. And even in the System 6 days they had Apple File Exchange to access FAT-formatted disks to write data out for PC users.

For Ethernet, Apple started building in Ethernet as standard before PC makers. They sold a laptop with Ethernet built-in in 1994, this was unheard of on PC laptops.

As for AppleTalk, they pushed LocalTalk at a time before PCs had any built-in networking whatsoever, a PC network card cost a hundred bux and were only used by corporations whereas in the home if you had a Mac you could make a network with a printer cable between two machines, Apple got it for cheap by spending an extra 10 bucks on RS-422 for their serial ports, why wouldn't you advertise that?

If you're talking about AppleTalk the network protocol rather than LocalTalk the physical protocol, Apple bundled TCP/IP with MacOS before Windows did ("Trumpet WinSock" was third party software), back when Microsoft thought they could stop people from adopting the internet since "The Microsoft Network" was so going to be so much better.

Arguing that adopting the Apple making PowerPC machines adopting the Intel-defined USB which was already on PCs for years before was a means to keep people from moving data out from the "internet Mac" (which was advertised as letting you share information with the world with "there is no step 3") is just... it makes no sense.

iOS on the other hand... Completely different thing.

[buescher]

And technically (the best way, right?) there's a whole thing to suss out between AppleTalk, 422, and LocalTalk, hahahahahah, but it's effectively as proprietary as PS/2 ports were, until they weren't. And ADB was 100% proprietary iirc, but I'm not going to look it up for you.

[kalleboo]

TBF, Apple did publish public standards for LocalTalk and AppleTalk and there was third-party hardware that implemented it (including stuff like switches that Apple never implemented themselves)

ADB was definitely proprietary, but arguably it wasn't a data port, nobody used ADB to output data.