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Comment by retired | Hacker News Reader

I’m surprised to see those legacy USB ports on a board where space savings is important. Do they do it for backwards compatibility with older cases and housings?

And am I correct to see that the USB-C only does power? How do you connect your pheripherals to this board?

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I think legacy USB peripherals are very common. Almost all of my peripherals are legacy USB; I think I only own a single USB-C peripheral. Old stuff still works, so I don't need to buy new ones.

Interesting. I don’t own any legacy USB equipment anymore, everything is USB-C now. I started phasing out my old equipment ten years ago and everything from the past five years has had USB-C as standard. Even my shaver chargers over USB-C.

I guess that the people who use $350 boards also mainly use USB-C. Unless you want to connect old hardware to it but I don’t see that use-case.

Not being able to connect my devices to this board is a blocker for me.

A person who can justify spending $350 on an SBC can probably manage to shake enough change out of the sofa to buy an adapter to plug their widgets into it.

But, sure: It's definitely even cheaper than that to just sit back and complain about it.

Looks like all the USB-A devices purchased over the past 30 years have not been trashed and some people still use them.

Understandable but I would have preferred a couple of fully functional USB-C ports and then have people use dongles for using old hardware on this board. Similar to using a serial adapter.

There are still new USB-A devices being sold, it's not like it's deprecated or something

That is now illegal in the European Union. Everything sold is required to have USB-C.

> From 28 December 2024, the rules apply to mobile phones, tablets, digital cameras, headphones, headsets, videogame consoles, portable speakers, e-readers, keyboards, mice, portable navigation systems and earbuds sold in the EU. From 28 April 2026, they will also apply to laptops.

You’re not allowed to sell keyboard and mice with USB-A port? Doubt it. Can you link the source you’re quoting?

Edit:

It’s this right?

https://commission.europa.eu/news-and-media/news/eu-common-c...

That’s only for battery powered devices afaik.

Got it. I guess some people still use wired mice and keyboards with legacy connectors. But how many of those use them on a $350 board? Seems like a very small use case. I personally use Bluetooth for that, been doing that for the past 20 years.

You insist on calling it legacy connectors, but they are just perfectly good current day connectors to connect a keyboard, a video game controller, a USB drive, a printer, a scanner or the Bluetooth dongle for your Bluetooth mouse. I think only Apple decided that it was deprecated for them because it did not allow them to make their laptops thin enough to their taste. Meanwhile the rest of the world is perfectly fine with it for many use cases. You might also not believe it, but I also still use HDMI cables for screens, like a caveman ;)

USB A? That's very much not legacy

If anything, it's probably like an order of magnitude more common, even for new designs

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