Every electronic device has a probability of presenting some type of failure that slightly ruins the experience of use. Apple products are no exception, and MacBook Pro 2020 and MacBook Air are experiencing issues with USB 2.0 accessories. In this article we discuss all the details about it and the solution that Apple has offered.
Connect USB 2.0 accessories to Mac, an odyssey
Several users who have a MacBook Pro 2020 or MacBook Air have reported problems connecting accessories with USB 2.0. These reports are totally public since they have been made through the Apple support community and through Reddit . The error it gives is quite annoying as we can read, since the accessories connect and disconnect randomly without the user touching it. Obviously this failure occurs after connecting the accessory to a Hub, since these Mac do not incorporate any type of USB 2.0 connector.
One of the people who has complained describes his situation as follows, as MacRumors has collected:
I’m connecting a few things on the hub: HDMI for an external monitor, USB audio interface (powered by Mac), and a mouse. When the problem occurs, the mouse and USB audio interface stop working, but the HDMI connection continues to work smoothly every time.
It is important to note that the failure could be reproduced with different hubs, so here the problem would not be at first. The pattern of involvement in this problem is still not entirely clear since it seems that only the USB ports stop working. The rest of the outputs and inputs like HDMI continue to work normally. There is also no accessory that is reporting more problems, since it seems to have been given so much in mice, keyboards, storage units and many more.
Cause and solution
At first, the solution to these problems would be to restart the SMC, enter safe mode and even reinstall the operating system. But none of this has taken effect since the error has persisted in all cases, so it is clear that we are facing an operating system failure that may end up being solved through a software update in the future.
According to an expert through Reddit, the problem would be in the chipset that would be used with Catalina when using USB 2.0 devices . You should know that there are two types of USB-C hubs that vary in functionality: transparent and termination. The first type always presents this problem since the accessory is presented to the Mac as a USB 2.0. But in the second, this problem does not appear since it is presented as if it were a USB 3.0 output to the Mac and there would be no problem.
If this is your case, you will have to wait for a software update so that this annoying bug that has caused so many complaints in the Apple world is resolved.
