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Comment by sneak | Hacker News Reader

Regardless of how you feel about Apple's design choices, recent improvements in both Bluetooth and Wi-Fi mean that it's clear to even those that can't predict the future that wired/corded connections are going to be obsolete for all but the highest bandwidth (i.e. Thunderbolt/PCI/uncompressed UHD+ display) interfaces (and, of course, power). Most peripherals used by most people will be entirely wireless. This isn't an Apple thing, this is just the way things are going in our industry.

If you want "full port", invent a time machine and travel back to the time when people accepted cables. That time is gone now.

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I hope the pairing experiences we will commonly have will be much improved, because just about every time I use Bluetooth to pair anything I have to go through a struggle.

AirPods are painless in that regard, at least when used with Apple devices.

Airpods still have annoyances for me at times. Sometimes doesn't connect, sometimes connects. Sometimes won't disconnect from another device. It's a bit better than a standard bluetooth device, but still not great.

My impression of airpods is they added on demand 'connect to me' and always on device listing to the bluetooth protocol.

I think a way to solve the 'which device to connect to' conundrum is to make NFC re-association a standard thing with bluetooth devices. So instead of screwing around with software menus, you would bash your 2 devices together and have them (re)connect within 200ms.

The nintendo switch kind of gives this to you with their joycons. Slide the joycon in and it's associated & connected with that switch, no software fuckery required. It's a lot nicer than many other BT experiences for me.

Wifi on the other hand, has been fairly good since day 1.

The general direction an industry is going isn't usually the issue. Most designers can predict the general trends in an 'infinite timescale'.

The issue comes to when it's a acceptables trade-off. I think for now the wireless future is not here yet, and won't be for the next year or 18 months.

Apple didn't pull it off with it's AirPods (too pricy for wide adoption, still lag in the bluetooth stack, only 3 or 3 designs available for something that needs to fit on people's ear), I'd say they were too early to pull the plug on wired.

This argument has been made since the iMac without a floppy drive or non-USB serial port.

If they were too early, people would stop buying their devices because of the "lack" of functionality. They haven't. That means that the people who claim they're too early were wrong.

It turns out that most people who buy computers and most people who complain about the range of ports on computers are not the same size groups, and are mostly not comprised of the same people.

The pace of purchase of the laptops and iPhones slowed down though. It can be attributed to a lot of factors, but we can't make the blanket argument "it's selling more than ever so they can't be doing it wrong" anymore.

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