A forthcoming major motion picture: A Fistful of Dongles.
Plot: Clint Eastwood buys a Dell XPS 13 2-in-1 and wants to transfer some files from his old hard drive, in a USB 3.0 enclosure, only to discover that the machine lacks standard USB connectors.
Dialog:
- Joe: “Get three coffins ready.”
- Engineer: “It could be one millimeter thinner if we force consumers to use USB-C.”
- Joe: “My mistake. Four coffins…”
Related:
If this one doesn’t bomb, any chance we’ll get “A Fistful of Dongles 3” where Clint’s son (or perhaps grandson) discovers he can plug almost any computer into almost any peripheral using USB 3?
A $6 cable?
I bought my wife a new HP Spectre 2-1 late last year. It is a similar design to your XPS. It was slightly lighter than my HP computer that was a year old. It looked identical other wise, same screen and same battery life an so forth. But it would not work with any external stuff without a dongle. We took it back 2 days later due to this USB-3 thing. We traded it for a year old design with USB-2 ports. Both were priced the same. I wonder how this will be handled in the next years model. The guys at the store told me they were having trouble selling the USB-3 stuff.
If you have patience, you can buy adapters for 99 cents on ebay. They take a month to come from china but order 1/2 a dozen so you have lots of spares for when they break or you lose them.
There is a LOT of stuff like this that costs $1 (sometimes even $1 Canadian) on ebay from China. I didn’t know how this was possible (mailing a letter from the US to China costs $1.15 just for the postage) but then I found out that there is some quirk in the US-China postal treaty that makes it cheap for the Chinese to fill a shipping container full of mail and then the USPS has to deliver it the rest of the way (e.g. from California to Mass.) for less than it would cost for you to mail the same package domestically.