Ditch Your USB-A Dongle and Embrace the USB-C Life

I’ve had one thing of a tough relationship with dongles. Particularly, the common-or-garden USB-A dongle—the little factor you plug into your desktop or laptop computer laptop to make wi-fi peripherals like keyboards, mice, and headsets, work. These little issues have induced me no finish of sleepless nights, emotional anguish, and private turmoil. 

They feel and look extraordinarily janky once they’re plugged right into a laptop computer, doubly so when you need to plug a USB-A dongle right into a USB-C dongle as a result of so many laptops now have solely USB-C ports. They’re terrible, I hate them, and I want ailing upon them. Fortunately, we’re beginning to see increasingly gadgets delivery with USB-C dongles, and these new digital barnacles are like a balm upon the religious wounds inflicted by the dongles of yore.

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Why Do Dongles Even Exist

First issues first: Why do some gadgets have dongles? Usually, wi-fi equipment like mice, keyboards, headsets, and gamepads will connect with your gadgets over both Bluetooth or the two.4-GHz band. Bluetooth can introduce a palpable latency into communications between your equipment and your laptop. That may imply the audio is out of sync with the video, and your mouse and keyboard can really feel unbearably sluggish.

That’s the place the two.4-GHz band is available in. Not solely is it faster, eliminating any sense of lag between your gadgets, nevertheless it has a for much longer vary than Bluetooth. Meaning you’ll be able to plug your headset dongle into your PC and stand up and stroll round with out dropping the sign, until you get fairly distant. All the perfect gaming equipment embrace 2.4-GHz dongles as of late, as a result of while you’re gaming, even the slightest little bit of latency might be disastrous. 

That used to imply your laptop or laptop computer could be coated in thick black rectangular dongles protruding of each out there port. However over the previous 12 months or two, USB-C dongles have develop into the norm, and I’m by no means going again.

Extra Like USB-Cool

The most important advantage of a USB-C dongle over Bluetooth is that I needn’t fumble with pairing and unpairing when switching gadgets. However its leg up over USB-A is that I can simply seize my USB-C dongle from my PC, stick it into my pill or my recreation console, and that’s that. Positive, that is potential with USB-A dongles, however there’s a catch. Go searching at your gadgets, and consider each you utilize on a given day. What number of have USB-A ports? Your desktop, certain. Your laptop computer, perhaps. However your telephone? Your pill? Your recreation consoles? Precisely.

Each machine I personal has a USB-C port. Not simply my laptop computer and desktop however my (Android) telephone, my iPad Professional, my Nintendo Change, my PS5, the whole lot I take advantage of in a given day has USB-C ports now. Heck, even Kindles. Meaning my keyboard (Logitech G915), mouse (SteelSeries Prime Wi-fi), and headset (Logitech G735) can work seamlessly with any of them.

With that in thoughts, have a look at the worth of an excellent gaming headset. You’re wherever from $100 to $400 for a killer one; that’s not a negligible expense. After I have a look at a high-end gaming headset and I see no USB-C transmitter, I simply take into consideration how limiting that’s. A fantastic wi-fi gaming headset can also be an amazing pair of wi-fi headphones, however with out USB-C connectivity, they’re severely restricted. They’re not take-everywhere, wear-everywhere headphones, however they’re priced like they’re.

Infinite Pleasure, or Crushing Darkness

Now let’s have a look at what it’s prefer to have a gaming headset that has a USB-C dongle. Right here is the place you think about me and a pair of headphones gleefully bounding by a sunlit meadow in sluggish movement, hand in earcup—not a care on this planet, free from wires, free from the oppression of USB-A, we will go wherever collectively. The headphones include me to work, to the café, to the sofa to play some Elden Ring, and even to mattress if I would like rain sounds blasted into my cranium whereas I sleep. She is my fixed companion and I’m hers; we’re inseparable, hovering by the world swaddled in a comfortable quilt of infinite sound.

Sounds nice, proper? That’s as a result of it’s. In the meantime, utilizing a headset with a USB-A dongle is form of like, properly, have you ever ever seen outdated footage of Harry Houdini being certain in a straight jacket and chains, then locked right into a trunk and thrown into the ocean? It’s form of like that, however as a substitute of being a magic trick the place you swim to the floor unscathed, you simply form of simply keep down there. Locked within the trunk. Chained up. Screaming into a chilly, detached ocean that can inevitably crush the life from you as you sink into its lightless depths. Forgotten. Alone.

It’s fairly straightforward to see which one’s higher. I don’t wish to get chained up and drowned. That’s why I’ll at all times select a USB-C dongle over USB-A. Sure, this comparability is sensible, don’t give it some thought too laborious.

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