Disappearing ports

This issue Ken Rigsby is being driven potty by...

I’ve owned or driven loads of cars. A lifetime ago, for example, I had an Austin Maestro. Remember those? They could talk! My memory might be playing tricks on me but my Maestro’s chatty dashboard mostly seemed to say, “I’ve broken down again. Sorry about that, old chap”.

Later, I treated myself to a Ford Granada Scorpio. That was a good car. Well, right up until it veered off the road and ended up crumpled in a ditch. Must have had faulty self-driving technology, that one. Since then, I’ve owned Volkswagens, Toyotas, Volvos, Minis and even, for reasons I might one day explain in this column, a Reliant Robin.

That’s many different marques. But there’s one thing that hasn’t changed over the years, and that’s the little camping fridge I bought way back in the 1980s. It still works, and I’ve been able to power it with every motor I’ve ever been in. That’s because all car makers have for decades equipped their automobiles with a cigarette-lighter socket. Few people now use the little stalks to set fire to fags,ags, but the socket is a convenient source of electricity. It’s also a standard shape and size across the whole industry, so my little cooler was just as chilled in my Volvo estate as it was in the Mini.

You may think I’m about to segue into an overdue rant about Apple removing the 3.5mm audio jack from its iphone 7, but I’m not. Well, okay, I am a bit. If the likes of Samsung can produce a smartphone with a headphone socket - a phone that’s smaller, sleeker and every bit as powerful as the latest iphone – then, really, what’s Apple’s excuse?

But I digress. The jury’s out on whether Apple’s ditching of the decades-old 3.5mm jack is a good idea, but there are manyny disappearedappe pports that I still miss. Ethernet, for example. Some of today’s thinnest laptops have dispensed with this convenient network connection. Obviously we’re all supposed to be wireless now, but if your router develops a Wi-fi hiccup, you’ll be grateful for the option to make a quick cable connection.

I’m also not terribly happy that the SD card format has become the de facto standard for computer slots, because I still have a worryingly large number of disparate card formats in my collection.

USB is on the way out, too. Or rather, what most of us currently know as ‘USB’. Some new laptops lack the traditional USB (Type-a) sockets, favouring instead the newer, smaller and reversible USB Type-c (or USB 3.1). This new plug is undoubtedly the future but, in the here and now, I still have loads of USB Type-a devices I need to connect (and the cables to go with them). I’m sure you do too.

Elsewhere in the land of cancelled connections I have an old Firewire camcorder that I’m unable to hook up to any of my current PCS, and a perfectly good VGA monitor that won’t work with one of my newer computers. If I had the mo money to squirt squillions on a state-ofth the-art Macbook Pro, I’d be disappointed to find that it can’t instantly connect to my smart TV via my £1 Poundland HDMI ca cable. Apple, you see, dropped HDMI po ports from its latest models. Instead I’d ne need to buy a £70 adapter.

But my 30-year-old camping fridge wi will keep working in almost any car I choose. Even Tesla - the electric-car wo wonder-firm whose stock-market va value recently surpassed that of ev even the mighty Ford - equips its fu futuristic motors with the standard 12 12V cigarette-lighter socket. And that’s th the lesson for many tech companies: st stop removing ports that millions of pe people still use, because you shouldn’t be fixing things that aren’t broken.

I could squirt squillions on a Macbook Pro, but it can’t connect to my TV via my Poundland cable