Quote:
Originally Posted by PB PM
Hubs are fine, unless of course your USB device is saturating the BUS. I’ve also never found a hub that doesn’t crap out after a year or so, other than the ancient USB1.0 hub we got for our G3 Power Mac in 1998 that is still in use today. Why? No idea, but it works, so why not since it’s fast enough for any keyboard and mouse.
For things like USB thumb drives, mice and keyboards hubs are great, not so much for data hungry connections. Less of an issue with thunderbolt, but let’s be honest, most people using USB hubs aren’t using thunderbolt and are limited to USB3.1 gen 1 or 2 speeds.
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1) Data speeds can be a concern for some, but not for most. In those situations, a single, direct connection is preferable. Better yet would be a daisy-chainable TB3 drive so the port is not lost entirely.
2) The little hub I linked to has proven to be
very reliable. I think we have replace2 2 failed units of the ~500 we have sold since 2017 when we first started carrying them.
Quote:
Originally Posted by PB PM
… as long as the computer does what I need it to do it’s fine.
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For techie types, this will always be the case. For everyone else, however, the maintenance requirements for an OS like Windows or Linux are beyond the desirable scope for a large number of people. The single remaining issue here is price. I would venture to guess that 90% of Windows users would switch to Mac were the price of an iMac around $500. But that is not the computer Apple wants to make. With Apple's margins consistently around 40%, a low end iMac costs at least $600 to build. And that's for the bare-bones clunker that is the base iMac. Considering Apple sells very few of those, I'm guessing the margins are much lower—probably around 20%, which means it actually costs Apple $800 or so to build the $1100 entry level iMac, which is the worst seller (at least in our shop) and not by some small margin. I think their quality/design choices automatically alienate most Windows users, and it isn't because of greed. They simply are not willing to build cheap crap.