It’s a goocher. From the latest GetUSB poll, “How Many USB Ports Do You Need?” a whopping 40% said the standard 4 USB ports is good enough.

What is more interesting is that over 50% of the voters indicated even with 8 USB ports they could still use more. This means most users have at least two USB Hubs hanging from their system. What a mess. You may ask yourself, why don’t they make bigger USB hubs? One answer might be this:

Chip manufacturers make either a 4 port or 7 port USB hub chip. You run into power problems after 7 ports. Companies who build USB Hubs are limited by this chip design. Placing two hub chips inside a hub box doesn’t make much sense because your host computer already has several USB ports - they just figure you’ll buy two units if you need more (4 or 7) USB ports.

With these poll results I think it’s safe to say USB is the majority leader in peripheral connectivity.