2y ago

Vintage Mac Community Begs Manufacturers for New Supply of Rare Dongle as Resellers Charge $250

www.404media.co

Technology @lemmy.world

Lee Duna @lemmy.nz

2y ago

Vintage Mac Community Begs Manufacturers for New Supply of Rare Dongle as Resellers Charge $250

www.404media.co /vintage-mac-community-begs-belkin-for-new-supply-of-rare-dongle-as-resellers-charge-250/

Apple @lemmy.world

misk @sopuli.xyz

2y ago

Vintage Mac Community Begs Manufacturers for New Supply of Rare Dongle as Resellers Charge $250

www.404media.co /vintage-mac-community-begs-belkin-for-new-supply-of-rare-dongle-as-resellers-charge-250/

43 comments

Another great example of why proprietary connectors are stupid as hell. I'm going to be upset when my 2DS XL charger breaks and I can't get an easy replacement.
- in this case, apple display connector (adc) predates dvi, so they didn't really have any other option for supporting an all-digital signal path to an lcd monitor, especially not one that could also power the monitor and provide usb.
  this happens a lot with apple proprietary connectors. lightning predated usb-c by almost 5 years, and it was a much better connector than the existing industry standard at the time (usb micro-b). it didn't really start to feel like a problem until many years later when usb-c started offering most of the same advantages and more.
  
  Then they could have released an open standard instead of creating a proprietary connector.
- Luckily they are popular enough that you can get pretty inexpensive cables that allow USB charging.
  
  Where? I haven't been able to find it
- Aren't those cables available in quantities though?
  
  They are for now
- Thankfully, at least recently, most devices have settled on only a few standards. And some older devices can be modded to work with newer ports. I know rhere are some mods to add a usb-c port to the 2ds, and from what I understand they're not too difficult to do.
  
  Also thanks to the EU forcing the manufacturers (of smartphones at least) to go for the same standard
  
  Yes. I have and will be doing type C conversions a lot.
That's the most hipster headline I've ever read. And on brand for Apple/Mac's to have a dongle issue...
- Dongle dysfunction affects 1 in 2 American men between the ages of 35 and 65 in one way or another. It is not something to be ashamed about, but something to talk about with your IT guy. There is often a simple and discrete solution to be found.
This is sad in many levels.
I bet Fry's Electronics had a warehouse full of these things. Just have to figure out where they ended up when they went out of business.
- Time to start searching Ollie's and Big Lots.
- WTF are they crying to Apple for?
  They aren't? I didn't see anything in the headline, the article, or the change.org petition about them crying to Apple.
  From the petition: "[Sign to urge] Belkin and other tech producers to recognize the demand for the Belkin ADC to DVI cable or a suitable alternative"
Couldn't someone just remake it or is it still protected with some corpo patenting bullshit?
- It's not worth the cost. There aren't enough 20+ year old macs in the wild who need to connect to a DVI monitor to make the assembly commercially viable after tooling costs.
  Though it's a very good representation of why non-standard connection schemes are a terrible idea. I would say that outlawing black mock turtlenecks would be an appropriate punishment, given that Steve Jobs is dead and we can't kill him a second time. But that would also seem unfair as it would mean we would have to all see Panos Panay shirtless all the time. That just punishes the rest of us.
- In another post on those topic a commenter revealed that it's quite easy to assemble one from basic cables that are cheaply available. It's just a matter of splicing and re sealing.
Aside from the first-gen Power Macs, which used NuBus, Power Macs generally had PCI slots.
The guy with a Power Mac G4 in the article definitely has PCI slots.
Can probably just put an old video card in the thing.
googles
Yeah.
https://discussions.apple.com/thread/7937922
Alternately, you could go with an older, slower, possibly cheaper PCI video card as well. You could use a PCI video in combination with the AGP card. Not sure if the AGP card is missing, if you can run with a PCI video only.
ATI made a couple of PCI Radeon cards for Mac, 7000 and 9200, I think, with VGA & DVI outputs. Might be hard to find these days.
- I had a radeon 7000 PCI card back in the day, it was a steaming pile.
While my VGA card from 1990 had the 15 pin connector, still present on 2023 monitors
- They're getting rare, though. Certainly no longer the standard video connector they were 10 years ago.
  They can certainly be found, but I don't know how long for.
  
  True, now it's HDMI everywhere, but I'd prefer DisplayPort maybe
Neat, I have 6 of those in a drawer.
And two of the active (powered) adc to vga converters
And 3 or 4 old ADC monitors.
- How big is your drawer? 0.o
I've got like 5 of the original Apple ones in storage... I'm guessing they're actually worth something?

43 comments