Just so we're clear, you'd rather have to carry around 10 different dongles just so you can know, visually, what a port is capable of?

I'm sorry - when I buy the laptop, I look at what the port can do, and I remember it. If I'm in a meeting and I have to use someone else's, I ask if they know. If they don't, I try it, and if it doesn't work, we move on.

I can't come up with any scenario in which this is a bad thing, outside of sheer laziness or poor planning.

> Of course other Devices will follow that come without external power supplies and other features that don't allow for graceful degradation. Thats my point.

I don't get your point.

The Type C connector will support USB 3.1, which AFAIK is backwards compatible with older versions of USB.

The Type C connector will also support Thunderbolt 3 (and the datatypes that Thunderbolt supports, aside from perhaps DisplayPort 1.3).

Support for the protocols is done at the chipset level. All Type C connectors in Intel computers will support everything that the Type C currently supports, as the support is built in to the Alpine Ridge chipset. Other device makers will support all the USB 3.1 stuff at a minimum out of the gate, and potentially support Thunderbolt down the road also.

Where exactly is the backwards compatibility issue? Do you mean forward compatibility?

Ah, I see your point. At the same time, though, there do exist some USB 3.0 peripherals that require of a lot of bandwidth (like docking stations), that, while theoretically backwards compatible, wouldn't actually work with a USB 1.0 port in practice due to bandwidth constraints.