USB connects everything from keyboards to crypto wallets to those little nerf turds that you can use to repel your co-workers
So with it having so many common lightweight applications, why hasn't it just gone fully wireless as it turns out?
There was an effort to do just that all the way back in the mid
2000s there was an official standard developed simply called wireless USB and the idea was to come out with a whole bunch of devices
That would simply work with computers that had wireless USB
Transponders built in so we're not talking about using a dongle where the actual device that you're trying to use such as a mouse is
Not actually handling the USB signal itself This was supposed to be native
Wireless USB was designed to be as close as possible to wired USB
Just without the wires the protocols over which the signals were sent were very similar to how traditional USB communicates meaning
Wide compatibility with many devices should have been less of a challenge compared to introducing an entirely new standard
Of course wireless communication is nearly always slower than a wired equivalent
Just compare your home Wi-Fi to a PC connected via Ethernet if you don't believe me
But wireless USB was supposed to provide speeds pretty darn close to USB 2.0
Which was the dominant USB revision when the first wireless USB products hit the market in 2007
Specifically it had a maximum of 480 megabits per second the same as USB 2.0 from 3 meters away
That's 10 feet for our American friends But it would also still operate at up to 110 megabits from 10 meters away
Meaning that you could still reach a peripheral in another room like a printer and
Wireless USB didn't even need a direct line of sight between connected devices
Thanks to the fact that it used a fairly low frequency that could penetrate objects and walls
Kind of like Wi-Fi with lots of big industry players involved in trying to make this new untangled world of reality
Including HP, Intel, Samsung and Microsoft a wireless future seemed assured and yet
It never happened Probably the biggest reason that wireless USB failed is that it was late to the wireless party
Although the industry started working on the standard back in 2004
Device makers had to get permission to use certain frequencies from communications authorities and that approval process took time as it often does with government
bureaucracy by the time wireless USB gadgets started appearing then the convenience that they were supposed to enable was
Pretty much already taken care of by Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. Take our printer example
Why is wireless USB necessary when you could just connect your printer to a Wi-Fi network that has significantly greater range?
Or let's say you're trying to connect a wireless display
Intel's Y die was already a thing by the time wireless USB came out and as the name implied it used Wi-Fi direct
Which later evolved to support faster speeds at longer ranges than wireless USB could
Wireless USB was also touted as something that could be useful for storage
But unfortunately it also came out right around the time that internet connected cloud storage was starting to gain traction
And people were more drawn to having their smart phones sync their photos with the cloud or
Upload them to social rather than mess around with storing them on their own hard drives
But regardless of the specific use cases it was going to cost PC manufacturers more money to put wireless USB
Transponders inside their machines and there just wasn't much incentive to do it if everyone was just gonna use alternative technologies anyway
I mean heck one of those alternatives was none other than USB
3.0 which ran at 5 gigabit per second much faster than both wireless USB and
Even Wi-Fi for that matter so if you really needed that extra speed for quick file transfers
You were gonna be using a cord anyway so wireless USB was quickly relegated to the dustbin of tech history and
Maybe one day it'll make a comeback But until then we can admire Apple's pioneering work in giving consumers as few ports as they possibly can
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