> I totally get why they dropped the optical drive when they did. Online/flash storage was getting cheap enough and ubiquitous enough that it was a real replacement for CDs.
> This is not the case with USB-C, evidenced by the fact that apple doesn't even use it on their own consumer electronics
yet (!!!).
A better comparison would be when the original iMac abruptly dropped support for SCSI, ADB, and serial in favor of USB, which was almost unknown at the time. The iMac drove demand for USB peripherals and started us down the path to USB becoming ubiquitous, but everyone griped about it at the time and there were all sorts of ADB-to-USB adapters for awhile.
> This is not the case with USB-C, evidenced by the fact that apple doesn't even use it on their own consumer electronics yet (!!!).
A better comparison would be when the original iMac abruptly dropped support for SCSI, ADB, and serial in favor of USB, which was almost unknown at the time. The iMac drove demand for USB peripherals and started us down the path to USB becoming ubiquitous, but everyone griped about it at the time and there were all sorts of ADB-to-USB adapters for awhile.
That being said, I think USB-C does have some serious issues which Marco outlines well in another post: https://marco.org/2017/10/14/impossible-dream-of-usb-c