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RE: Pfff
by Wootery on Mon 9th Dec 2013 18:17 UTC in reply to "Pfff"
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Using same kind of cable/plug for hard drives, PC periferals, speakers, network seems to be as far as a target today as it was 10 years ago.

It will never happen - it's the way it is for good technical reasons. Let's look at audio: USB speakers means moving the task of digital-to-analog conversion into the speakers, driving up their price. Not to mention that the headphone plug standard is used by more than just computers.

USB speakers are out there if you want them though, of course.

As for USB vs SATA vs HDMI/DVI/DisplayPort vs Ethernet-over-copper, I doubt we're going to see them converge either, as SATA, HDMI (etc) and Ethernet benefit from being specialised for their purpose. You pay a high price for one-size-fits-all technologies like USB, in that you can't have task-specific innovation.

There's also backward-compatibility, which is a huge concern for real-world products.

USB has successfully taken the place of all three of PS/2, serial, and parallel, so there's been some unification... just not recently. (I'm ignoring Firewire, but personally I've never seen it used, ever.)

Personally I'm not too bothered by this. It's a little inconvenient, but that's all. (Maybe I'd think differently if I were a sysadmin, though.)

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