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Comment by slantyyz | Hacker News Reader

The thing that bugs me about the argument for USB-C only on the new MBPs is that the early 2011 MBPs came out while Steve Jobs was alive.

That year was the first appearance of the Thunderbolt port on a Macbook Pro. You could have theoretically removed every legacy port outside of the MagSafe port and only had a bunch of TB ports to handle the I/O of peripherals. Yet Apple left the USB, FW800 (on the 15/17, maybe the 13 too) and SD reader instead of making people buy dongles to make up for the slack.

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There wouldn't have been any auxiliary advantages to switching to full TB2.

TB2/mDP can't carry power. It was physically a much larger port, which means they couldn't scale down the size of the machine. And, ultimately, mDP is a much less useful port than the universally standard USB-C.

For the sake of argument, in 2011 we'd be talking about TB1.

TB1/mdp is larger than USB-C - in 2011 terms though, it'd be considered small. The mdp port is smaller than regular USB, ethernet and FW800 - all ports available on early 2011 MBPs.

TB1 should carry some power. I don't have my 2011 MBP any more, but I'm near certain that I was able to run a thunderbolt capable seagate external 2.5" hard drive without providing additional power. I also had a Kanex TB-> USB3.0 adapter, and I could swear it was able to power a USB 2.5" external also.

http://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/124485/can-a-thunde...

  > TB2/mDP can't carry power

  > > TB1 should carry some power. 
  > > I was able to run a thunderbolt capable seagate external 2.5" hard drive

(all this with the caveat of "I am not a physicist, but…")

All data is essentially energy/power, right? Isn't all communication, a change in energy state? Therefore, all data is essentially a transfer of energy/power.

Even the older standards - serial, firewire, USB 1, USB 2, USB 3, etc - carried some power, although (in general), a fairly small amount. I've used external USB-2 drives without a power source, except that provided by the USB-2 cable.

The maximum power-draw of a USB device is documented in the standards, but generally, USB 2 is permitted to draw 500mA, at 5V: 2.5W.

The power of TB2/mDP wasn't limited by the plug, but rather by the specifications of the standard/protocol.

USB-C is intended to provide significantly more power. All USB Type-C cables should support 60W. High-power cables should support 100W.

The older standards can (just about) provide enough power to spin a hard-disk, but the newer standards can power and charge a laptop.

Ok. A couple of things. My original point that you replied to relates to 2011, not 2016.

The analog is that in 2011 TB was a new, multi-purpose plug that can do just about anything (and USB-C is that thing in 2016, and it benefits from 5 additional years of progress, so yes, of course it can do more than TB). IIRC, Apple bragged about how great TB was when they announced it.

TB can provide 18V/10W/550mA. That's enough for what most people used USB 2 for in 2011 (Apple didn't introduce USB 3 until the 2012 MBP, IIRC).

At the very least Apple could have chosen to create a similar situation where TB could replace all the MBP's data ports that mattered in 2011 (in the same way they dropped all ports in late 2016) and force everyone to use a dongle for backwards compatibility when they introduced the early 2011 MBPs. But Apple didn't. Probably because they knew people would be unhappy. If Apple had the #courage to drop the USB and FW ports back then, people would have already been living the #donglelife for 5 years. Nobody would have even blinked or complained in the transition to USB-C.

And it also really doesn't matter that TB couldn't charge a Macbook Pro in 2011. Nobody would have cared, as everyone was still deeply in love with MagSafe (and many still are).

>> All USB Type-C cables should support 60W.

That might be true, but even Apple doesn't make it that simple, because they made a 61W charger (yes, I see that the charger's 1W over the 60W limit) that's incompatible with a bunch of previous cables designed for 29W chargers and you have to read the serial number on the cable just to be sure you're using the right one (I suspect a lot people won't know to do that).

https://support.apple.com/en-ca/HT201700

Jobs took medical leave January 17th, 2011.

Sure but the MBPs came out in March 2011, so the design decisions very likely happened in 2010.

This is a pointless debate, but I'm sure he had other priorities at that time.

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