> Apple went all in on USB with the iMac in 1997 well before PCs were completely onboard.

"PCs" were using either parallel or serial ports, in addition to the PS/2 ports for mice and keyboards. None of them were proprietary or if they were, they were widely used so basically standard. USB ports were added easily as expansion cards on those PCs (TBH I don't recall if it was the case already in 1997, don't remember owning any USB peripheral back then)

What’s your point? Do you really think that Apple should have used PS/2?

My point is that PCs already had perfectly standards for cheap peripheral communication, so there was less pressure to upgrade to USB. I remember the "PC2000" slogan that aimed at having USB-only PCs by 2000, it probably took 3-4 extra years.

> Apple was part of the patent pool for FireWire

Apple is listed first as the designer, then second the IEEE1394 working group. Indeed, there's some indication that Apple's development started in the 80's and it wasn't until later it was presented as a standard.[1] Funnily enough, they wanted it to replace SCSI, another technology you noted as a counter to Apple not liking standards they don't control.

> is also part of the patent pool for USB C

Being part of a patent pool doesn't really mean anything to me, given how companies use patents strategically and trade them. Do you have details on what patents may be shared? (I ask because I looked and it wasn't obvious from some light googling on my part).

> and was early to be onboard with Thunderbolt along with Intel.

They weren't early to onboard, they developed it with Intel (even if Intel held most of the patents and may have done the lion's share of the work, I'm not sure on that point).[2]

> Apple went all in on USB with the iMac in 1997 well before PCs were completely onboard.

Being able to control the hardware completely allows they to make shifts like that, because there was no one "PC" to be completely onboard. That said, they make moves away from it where they could for protocols they had some level of control and or steering of (FireWire, Thunderbolt, etc).

> Apple’s QuickTime container is part of the standard

Apple's QTFF was donated to be the container for MP4, but for a decade or more prior to that it was proprietary (but may have been open to implementation by third parties, I'm not sure). The main problem was that Apple licensed and defaulted to using Sorenson video codecs in their Quicktime framework and shipped it along with their video players, locking down the playing of the format to people willing to purchase the Sorenson codec individually or to those that used their player.

I admit this one is less about using a standard of their own and more just an early example of the platform control and lock-in they're known for now.

> And Apple is in the patent pool for H.264

Again, being in a patent pool for a large company doesn't by itself signal anything to me, given how strategically large orgs use patents. I would need some more info to view this one way or another.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE_1394

2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thunderbolt_(interface)

What exactly is your complaint? That Apple only uses standards that it contributes to? What other computer maker was going to move technology forward?

Should Apple have used the PS/2 connector instead?

> That said, they make moves away from it where they could for protocols they had some level of control and or steering of (FireWire, Thunderbolt, etc).

What were they going to use instead of FireWire? USB 1 was painfully slow. Again what other “standard” should they have used?

There was never a Mac that didn’t have USB after the iMac.

You can go back even further Nubus was licensed from Texas Instruments (used in the Mac II in 1987) and they moved to PCI with the second generation PowerMacs in 1996 (?)

> What exactly is your complaint?

My complaint? I'm just calling into question your counterpoint exampkes supplied when someone stated that Apple only likes standards they control. Whether it's warranted or they have good reason to in some cases is somewhat besides the point, they have a long history of developing their own standards, sonetimes because they are addressing a problem that isn't solved by another technology, and sometimes just because they would rather have something they control whether the market segmentation and user confusion it causes is best for the customer or not.