Replies

As the guy notes in the vid, USB 1 came out in 1996, 2 in 2000, 3 in 2008, and 4 not until 2019. Despite the 11 year gap between 3 and now, A) it doesn't seem like that was 11 years, and B) computers come with both 2 and 3 (plus the C ports, which aren't really any particular protocol, other than a wiring protocol).

The speed of USB 4 and dual channels, plus the proliferation of SSDs, will lead to the end of SATA connections for internal "hard drives", but it will be a long fade. And the connector will have to be more robust, so I could be way off. But SATA will have to up its game or die.

Flash drives using 2.0 are still sold (and we're in the middle of a memory glut). I'd be surprised if we don't see standardization/consolidation into USB 4 speeds with USB-C connectors. Adapters will of course become ubiquitous (and cheap), but the original USB connector will vanish over a period of, say, five years.

As Bobalu said, something like a Magsafe connector would be preferable. There are Magsafe-like adaptors now.

Best practices for IT dep'ts have started to move that way, as Hardastarboard notes, in part because of confidentiality, but that doesn't help against those sociiopathic USB killer sticks that use internal capacitors to blow out circuits of the CPU when plugged into the USB port. We're all probably old enough to remember when the computer at the office had a floppy drive? I had someone bring a box of old floppies to me (in my then-role as office flunky and data geek) to move them onto a thumb drive. Sure, no problem. We'd had the machines probably three years by that time (this was the previous generation from what we use now) and I'd previously not noticed (or had occasion to) that they had no floppy drives. None of them did. I brought in one of those USB floppy drives from the orphan tech archive at home, and did the transfer. I can see a day when the "diskless workstation" turns into a "portless workstation", and in our case, the IT people disable Bluetooth as well.