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Businesses seem to prefer incremental changes over large ones. Look at IPv4 vs IPv4. The two are completely incompatible and decades later we still haven’t changed.

12v is a good compromise because PSUs can be manufactured to support both the new and old standard and motherboards could even accept ATX power inputs and just ignore the 5v and 3v rails.

It allows for a transition period that’s much smoother than a complete revamp. It’s the more pragmatic solution.



>Look at IPv4 vs IPv4.

I'm not sure if this was a typo or deliberate, but either way the irony is beautiful.

>12v is a good compromise because PSUs can be manufactured to support both the new and old standard and motherboards could even accept ATX power inputs and just ignore the 5v and 3v rails.

The biggest sticking point with 12VO is that it's physically incompatible with ATX. 12VO doesn't provide the voltages ATX expects (obviously), nor does 12VO provide compatible physical connections (this incompatibility is a selling point).

ATX's biggest selling point and why we still use it to this day is its backwards and forwards compatibility. Outside of certain outliers you can just expect an ATX PSU to work with ATX equipment, regardless of when you buy or bought the parts; the virtues of a well-followed industry standard.


Standards must evolve


I agree with your larger point. That said, here in 2023 in the US, my phone only gets an IPv6 address from its LTE network. Of course there's some NAT6to4 somewhere that makes this all transparent to me, and I can still access v4-only resources just fine.




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