WEBVTT

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USB connects everything from keyboards to crypto wallets to those little nerf turds that you can use to repel your co-workers

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So with it having so many common lightweight applications, why hasn't it just gone fully wireless as it turns out?

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There was an effort to do just that all the way back in the mid

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2000s there was an official standard developed simply called wireless USB and the idea was to come out with a whole bunch of devices

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That would simply work with computers that had wireless USB

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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

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Not actually handling the USB signal itself This was supposed to be native

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Wireless USB was designed to be as close as possible to wired USB

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Just without the wires the protocols over which the signals were sent were very similar to how traditional USB communicates meaning

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Wide compatibility with many devices should have been less of a challenge compared to introducing an entirely new standard

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Of course wireless communication is nearly always slower than a wired equivalent

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Just compare your home Wi-Fi to a PC connected via Ethernet if you don't believe me

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But wireless USB was supposed to provide speeds pretty darn close to USB 2.0

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Which was the dominant USB revision when the first wireless USB products hit the market in 2007

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Specifically it had a maximum of 480 megabits per second the same as USB 2.0 from 3 meters away

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That's 10 feet for our American friends But it would also still operate at up to 110 megabits from 10 meters away

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Meaning that you could still reach a peripheral in another room like a printer and

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Wireless USB didn't even need a direct line of sight between connected devices

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Thanks to the fact that it used a fairly low frequency that could penetrate objects and walls

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Kind of like Wi-Fi with lots of big industry players involved in trying to make this new untangled world of reality

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Including HP, Intel, Samsung and Microsoft a wireless future seemed assured and yet

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It never happened Probably the biggest reason that wireless USB failed is that it was late to the wireless party

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Although the industry started working on the standard back in 2004

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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

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bureaucracy by the time wireless USB gadgets started appearing then the convenience that they were supposed to enable was

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Pretty much already taken care of by Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. Take our printer example

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Why is wireless USB necessary when you could just connect your printer to a Wi-Fi network that has significantly greater range?

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Or let's say you're trying to connect a wireless display

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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

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Which later evolved to support faster speeds at longer ranges than wireless USB could

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Wireless USB was also touted as something that could be useful for storage

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But unfortunately it also came out right around the time that internet connected cloud storage was starting to gain traction

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And people were more drawn to having their smart phones sync their photos with the cloud or

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Upload them to social rather than mess around with storing them on their own hard drives

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But regardless of the specific use cases it was going to cost PC manufacturers more money to put wireless USB

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Transponders inside their machines and there just wasn't much incentive to do it if everyone was just gonna use alternative technologies anyway

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I mean heck one of those alternatives was none other than USB

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3.0 which ran at 5 gigabit per second much faster than both wireless USB and

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Even Wi-Fi for that matter so if you really needed that extra speed for quick file transfers

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You were gonna be using a cord anyway so wireless USB was quickly relegated to the dustbin of tech history and

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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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If you guys enjoyed this video go ahead and give it a like if you didn't well

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