Customers will find out about it like they find out about other products and services… through advertising, word of mouth, and so on. When USB first came out, a lot of people didn’t know about it (remember PS/2 ports?), yet now USB is ubiquitous, it’s everywhere. When smartphones were first out, back when Microsoft and Blackberry were dominant, many consumers still had flip phones at best and didn’t know what a “smartphone” was. Then came the iPhone and Android, and the rest, as they say, is history.
It is the same with USB4 and beyond. It may take a few years but eventually most consumers will become educated in regards to the capabilities. Most consumers don’t need 40 gbps or higher speeds, but the versatility of USB-c, i.e., the ability to tunnel various protocols on the same wire (pcie, DisplayPort, USB, thunderbolt, Ethernet, power delivery), is what will make it indispensable in the future. In many ways, us techies are early adopters of this tech (in particular the high data rates of thunderbolt, USB4), but eventually it will work its way to the masses.
Just the fact alone that now up to 240W of charging will be possible will cement the utility and ubiquity of USB. It’s already starting to happen. Many new cars are now coming with USB-C ports for data and fast charging. Portable batteries have usb-c ports. Most Android phones have USB-C. It’s starting to proliferate, and rightfully so. My USB-C chargers are way more versatile than their USB-A predecessors. Devices negotiate the necessary charging voltage / amperage, and my chargers can supply 20V, 15V, 9V, or 5V depending on the device’s needs… it’s a beautiful thing to see, in my opinion. Long live USB.
PS/2 is an IBM standards, before it, we use AT keyboard connectors and serial ports for mice...
So yeah, I remember a lot of dead interfaces.
Even so, USB wasn't even particularly popular when it launched, mostly due to lack of devices and the fact that very few PCs came with it as standard.
In fact, USB 1.0 wasn't even all that great and it was considered vastly inferior to FireWire that landed a couple of years earlier.
USB 1.1 was when USB became an interface that people started using, but that was two and a half years after USB 1.0 launched, so things could've gone very differently if Intel hadn't pushed the standard as hard as they did.
Yeah, you're missing a few years of phone history there, Ericsson and Nokia invented the smartphone, but whatever...
If you're going to give someone a history lesson, at least try and get things right
I'm not saying there's anything wrong with the features offered, I'm simply saying that most people are unlikely to 1. discover them on their own and 2. ever really use them.
USB replaced something like half a dozen interfaces that weren't really interoperable and ended up with a very simple connector design. This appealed to consumers, although if you look at something like the industrial PC market, serial ports are still very popular due to how robust they are in comparison and for the small fact that you can lock the connector in place with screws.
The whole tunneling thing you're so keen on, isn't going to matter to 90% of people, as they don't use their devices like some/many of us here do.
Yes, it's nice, but we've already seen Samsung make and dump their Linux OS for Android devices that was meant to double as a PC replacement kind of thing with a docking system, since people weren't keen on it and it made things too complicated.
I wish our car had come with a USB-C port, but it has a useless 5V 500mA USB-A port that doesn't even provide enough power to keep my phone charged when I used it for navigation...
USB-A chargers also negotiate the charging Voltage and current... Unless you got some crappy dollar shop charger. In all fairness though, they don't tend to deliver more than 9 or 12V.
?? Not only that, Intel also donated thunderbolt3 to the USB-IF for USB4 to be able to add pcie tunneling and 40 gbps speeds. Intel also wrote most of the USB4 drivers for the Linux Kernel. But yet you want to kick them out.
