Was that really the case? I remember they were mocked for e.g. offering wifi only, firewire only etc., while the respective removed alternatives were way more common.
In the consumer space at least, WiFi was nowhere to be seen on a typical PC when Apple adopted it. Same with USB. So while it technically originated and existed elsewhere, there was no serious traction on it prior to Apple adoption.
What you say is also true: many people weren't ready to ditch the old when Apple decide to deprecate it.
This has been true for ages. They were the first to ditch the floppy disk drive and later cd drive in their computers. Both choices were very controversial at the time.
They were also the first to usb-c nirvana - they were shipping laptops with thunderbolt in 2011, and moved to usb-c in 2016, giving you four full-capability outputs at a time when most laptops had one, sometimes, and it took another 5 years before most laptops adopted at least one as standard and premium laptops sometimes had two.
(People look down on the move to usb-c which I don’t quite get, everyone seems to fawn over usb-c in other contexts but macbooks, amirite!?!?. Yes it’s nice to have a hdmi port but fundamentally if you buy into this vision that usb-c does everything but you also want to use a bunch of legacy ports (vs thunderbolt video, thunderbolt networking, etc) then obviously you’re going to have to have dongles, and people supposedly buy into that vision in other contexts. Apples implementation of that vision was fundamentally at least a decade ahead of the curve there, if you’re going to do that you want lots of ports and you want every port to do everything, not “this one is the only one that can charge fast”, “that one doesn’t have video output”, “if you run both ports they drop to some weird lower capability because you’re dividing the controller”. Those complaints are the things people don’t like about the base-tier M-series processors today, and apple’s previous models solved that problem long before anyone else did.)
Hell until very very recently a lot of the time the competition didn’t even have thunderbolt/Pcie tunnelling… you got 10gbps usb-c and a grab-bag of charging and display features, and you’re gonna like it. That’s still the case with motherboards and it’s literally only with this years’ release that we’re finally getting usb4/thunderbolt as standard on high-end boards. Literally more than a decade from when apple started putting thunderbolt on laptops, almost a decade from the era of 4x tb3 full-spec ports.
… and reminder that in classic usb fashion, usb4 still doesn’t even guarantee Pcie tunneling support. So really it can still be just a normal usb-c 10gbps connection in a silly mustache and trench coat. Even on the next-gen stuff. What’s the term for doing an ok, moderately competent but not even exceptionally good job while your competition repeatedly shoots themselves in the face, again? But it’s by design - the intent is deceiving and manipulating the customer into buying last year’s junk, it’s working as intended for USB-IF’s real customers and stakeholders.
> People look down on the move to usb-c which I don’t quite get
People loved Thunderbolt for replacing Firewire. They hated Apple's choice because these USB-C Macbooks shipped with precisely zero USB-A ports and relegated every user to carrying around a dongle.
The year is 2024, we're almost a decade out from Apple going all-in on USB-C and the predominant peripheral connector is still type-A. I don't like it either, but plugging our ears and pretending like it's not a problem is silly and only makes consumers mad.
> and reminder that in classic usb fashion, usb4 still doesn’t even guarantee Pcie tunneling support.
That is in fact the correct default to use. Ever heard of Thunderspy? https://thunderspy.io/
> Intel helped make this move possible, but it doesn’t manufacture laptops. Apple took the heat for “donglegate”.
And rightfully so. They took Intel's technology and told an unprepared and uninterested industry to switch or die. Naturally, very few manufacturers switched over and Apple's all-or-nothing strategy made more people mad than happy.
Having 4 lanes of Thunderbolt connectivity is awesome. It doesn't really fix the fact that none of them can easily connect to a wired keyboard or mouse.
> On the x86 desktop, usb-c is still surprisingly rare.
My motherboard only has one TB connector, everything else is type-A too. Most of the bandwidth is broken out over SATA or PCIe internally, and frankly I don't regret it one bit. 99% of my life, there is nothing plugged into that Thunderbolt port.
