Can't tell you how annoying it is to require a USB-A dongle or adapter, same with HDMI.

Very quickly meetings started with question of "who has a laptop with real HDMI/DisplayPort? We would like to start in 15s instead of 15 minutes of fighting with dongles..."

I use such a dongle a lot whenever I am presenting on conferences etc, and have been doing so for many years (even before the all-out for USB-C/Thunderbolt on MacBooks, there were no VGA ports, while many projectors still were; now I see a lot of HDMI, but still need the adaptor).

And I habe yet to have a single issue caused by that! Sure, damaged VGA cables and other weirdness, but never ever anything tracing back to the dongle.

In the same time I helped lots of people who struggled with their laptops with builtin VGA/HDMI Granted, usually not the laptops fault but rather PEBKAC / or people not knowing how to control Windows / Linux. Doesn't really matter: my point is that I see zero correlation between dongle usage and projector troubles.

Yes they are. The singular form of data is datum, not anecdote.

A personal experience is a data point. A 2nd hand story may well be an anecdote. "I have this and use it for that" is very much data in this case.

Is it enough to make product design decisions? No. Should Apple throw it out as an outlier? I would argue no - to think one person is a special snowflake with a unique problem is a mistake too.

Usual case was that with dongles, the display wasn't detected, at all, and having spent quite a bit of time fiddling with it, it didn't seem fixable.

    Very quickly meetings started with question of 
    "who has a laptop with real HDMI/DisplayPort? 
    We would like to start in 15s instead of 15 
    minutes of fighting with dongles..."

There are plenty of arguments against against going all-in on USB-C and forcing people to buy/carry multiple dongles. I don't like dongles myself! I still use a (pre-USB C) 2015 MacBook Pro, partially for that reason. I greatly prefer common ports such as HDMI to be built right into the laptop.

But "15 minutes of fighting with dongles?" Even if there's some comic exaggeration here, I don't understand.

Of all my gripes with Mac laptop dongles, "fighting" with them is not on the list. They are as plug and play as it gets. No drivers, etc... I hate carrying them but they're not exactly difficult to use.

The only way I can imagine people "fighting" with dongles is if they were nontechnical users who had difficulties simply plugging a cable in.

I personally strongly suspect that they had a broken batch of dongles, seeing as how trying to use them on other systems often resulted in display detection issues too.

Then there was of course "oh, I forgot the HDMI dongle"/"Someone took the one that was in the meeting room" and so on.

The end result was that it soon become normal for people to push against updating the laptops.

Paraphrasing what I said in another comment, dongles are flaky. If yours aren't, congratulations, but that doesn't mean other people are lying or that they don't know how things work.

But your random non-technical person only faced the fact that the chances of quickly setting up a meeting went down if the presenter needed a dongle.

Many "streamable" options often end up actually using HDMI dongles, if working at all. Or work with very limited set of systems (the weird apparently undocumented reverse-RDP for projectors in Windows, intel-proprietary streaming, etc.)

See what fun we have when we lie and exaggerate.

The quicker we move, the better. It'll be a little painful at first, but then we'll have only USB-C for everything.

None of this was possible prior to those "years of pain." I personally welcome our USB-C overlords.

We saw the same thing with Flash. Apple didn't like Flash and wanted it dead. They couldn't manage to kill it off through negotiation or outreach or by offering a better alternative, so they instead decided to weaponize the iPhone by refusing to support Flash at all. Their angry customers then killed Flash for them.

Don’t blame Apple for Flash’s demise. Blame Adobe. They allowed it to become the inefficient, security rats nest that it was.

The web is amazingly better now that Flash has been relegated to its best use: historical animations and games.

It is, by the way, absolutely not a clear advantage to get rid of old ports. USB C is about five years old. It is absolutely ludicrous to claim that any peripheral older than USB C is obsolete. That goes double for audio equipment. I have decades-old equipment that is still excellent by modern standards, but Apple has decided it's got to go because the 3.5mm headphone jack is unfashionable. If I were an Apple customer I would have no choice but to throw out all my electronics every few years or carry around a suitcase of adapters.

I have an HDMI monitor connected to my MacBook via a USB-C to HDMI/USB dongle, which also charges the computer, keyboard and trackpad, and another another via a UDB-C to DisplayPort cable.

I've been using my SDcard based camera less and less, both because my phones got much better and because they are much smaller. With an iPhone, which is a pretty decent camera, everything happens transparently and all my photos are automagically imported.

A reasonable docking station/port extender is small and has all those ports. I keep one in my backpack (even though I used it like once while traveling).

I really prefer it this way. I'd also love if Apple went back into making monitors that could charge my Mac and offer plenty of rarely used ports on its back.

I catch my Bride doing her photography workflow on her old, replaced macbook because it has the sdcard handy, she won't mess with the rat's nest in her office, and lord knows where the half a dozen dongles went.

The userbase of all tech products is too big for this to be reasonable now. This attitude was only successful during a time when fewer people overall each owned fewer devices individually. USB-A won and it will be around forever. HDMI won and it will be around forever.

So for the foreseeable future, if you ever do a presentation, and you have a Mac, you are going to bring a dongle.

If you're a teacher and you don't want to deal with an unreliable dongle 5 times a day, the most convenient Mac for you is currently the 2015 Macbook Pro with its built-in HDMI port.

This $30 dongle is cheaper than upgrading all the projectors to support Type-C, and still allows older PCs to use HDMI.

Not really sure what's unreliable about USB-C to HDMI dongles... sure if you buy a crappy one they have issues, but good ones aren't expensive these days (at least, for projector resolution. YMMV if you're trying to do 4k or something)

And this? https://www.cablematters.com/pc-655-123-usb-20-type-c-usb-c-...

You can even have USB-B: https://www.cablematters.com/pc-652-123-usb-20-type-c-usb-c-...

Here. You don't need a special cable - you need a small adapter: https://www.wish.com/product/5ae06f0a7ddb0672b9a704b9?share=...

USB Type-C receptacle to USB legacy adapters are explicitly not defined or allowed. Such adapters would allow many invalid and potentially unsafe cable connections to be constructed by users.

[1]: https://www.usb.org/sites/default/files/USB%20Type-C%20Spec%...

Video??? The comparison was with HDMI.

Also thanks for missing my main point about USB C...

(apologies to dongle teams who basically put custom computers inside cables)

But USB-C's port/cable standards are such a huge mess that there will probably never be a time when you can walk into a random conference room and find a USB-C video plug which 'just works'. The reality is Mac users come into meetings with a dongle hanging off their machine. And maybe Apple finally realized that's not a good look.

But some people live in apartments and some people park their car most of the day at work.

This is a way of saying - not everyone parks their computer at home with a nice reliable setup completely under their control.

Some people - for many reasons - have to use setups that are out of their control. Those people will be second-class citizens, carrying an assortment of duct-tape with them (dongles).

- case rigidity? The 2015 MBP case is fine.

- increases cost? No proof of this at all.

- adds weight? Again, a microscopic amount of weight to the laptop, far offset by the weight of dongles.

- takes up space? There's plenty of space to add this.

- lets in dust and liquid? The keyboard is a far more likely culprit.

Not sure what you mean - the iPhone 11 is Lightning, which is usually plugged into a charger not a laptop. I doubt many people plug their phones into the laptops anymore - syncing has been done over wireless for many years now.

It’s not about syncing at all

If you don’t understand this use case, then I wouldn’t make bold claims that *most* users never use USB A as it’s certainly false

Why would you do that? It's going to be super-slow - I don't believe it supports Fast Charging as the port can't handle the minimum 20 W.

So yes some people will buy a USB C to lightning cable for their older iPhone and a better wall adapter but most people will just use the included charger.

I'm sorry for the crude language but that's absolute bullshit.

Even within the Apple ecosystem, so many devices exist that use USB-A that I don't think that most people could accept the assertion that "most people don't use USB-A devices" without some kind of proof (like the sort of usability studies Jony Ive must've used for toilet paper at Apple)

But almost all the Android phones are USB-C aren't they?

Other manufacturers' laptops are also often USB-C for charging. And other brands of things like wireless headphones. Apple uses it less than other brands, as they still have Lightning in many places.

Maybe Apple changed their mind, yes (it's just a rumour at the moment), but I'm explaining why Apple does it the way they do at the moment. That was their thinking.

And you can't 'contradict' people's opinion on the way things should be done!

I'm on the same side, though I wouldn't mind one-two USB-A ports added for when I'm on the go in a hurry without a USB-C/A cable. Or the addition of some smart "mag-safe but still usable USB-C port" combo.

But given the complaints from the "moar ports" side and the complaints from the "USB-C all the things" side, one thing is clear: There's no pleasing some people, there's doubly so not pleasing all the people, and Apple has to make its choices and be done with it.

That said, while I believed in the initial promise of the touchbar (especially for specialty apps like DAWs, NLEs, etc), I welcome its removal now, and I think most do.

The one improvement I could see to make it workable would be a full keyboard with separate, tactile keys (the same as we have now) but with changebale legends/colors. That would make learning shortcuts in new apps etc or customizing key behavior very nice. It will also enabled on the fly switch to different keyboard layouts (e.g. from foreign language like AZERTY to Dvorak) complete with key legends.

Knowing Apple and their quirky fanbase, I daresay that the "remove all the ports" people wouldn't exist, if Apple wasn't the manufacturer removing the ports. Nobody ever said, "hey this headphone jack here? I hate it. This HDMI jack? Hate it. SD card reader? It is killing me."

Same with "VGA port? I hate it. Give me a proprietary port and a dongle"

It is not clear to me why Apple cannot sell a small handful of models. Two otherwise identical machines, one all-in on usb-c, the other with a mix of ports.

No technical reason, that's just not how Apple rolls.

If they do that, they do it with 2 different models (where the lack/presense of some feature makes sense based on the target market, e.g. college students), not with two otherwise identical models.

The primary use I see are;

1. Have a clone backup of your primary drive. (Carbon Copy Cloner, SuperDuper, Time Machine).

2. Have an extra storage handy for a rather economical price without lugging around an extra drive.

I was also planning to have a bootable Linux on one of those, but I never got around to actually doing that. Now that my 2012 MBA's flash storage is dead (and here in India either I can't find replacement, or repair shops are asking for half a kidney) I will see if I can actually use a card instead.

Personally, all my devices are endpoints or tools. For instance, if I lost my phone, it will take me a few hours or a day/two at best to get back to where I was. The same goes for my other devices (desktops, laptops).

In the most critical situation, say, I lost my phone while traveling, but lucky my wife's phone is in-tact, I can pick up hers and go through my contacts (we sync our contacts two ways). I can then login to anything anywhere by getting to her Password Manager, which fortunately has a copy of mine. I might need to ask her to authenticate it for me.

I strongly feel that one should have a pattern and system of redundancies and be independent of the devices one uses. I'm still discovering and learning a lot; not yet the best, but I'm happy I started quite a while back.

I will still have data on rsync.net, b2, Tarsnap, borgbase, some even in Dropbox. Also, the weekly backup to my external hard disk.

That card is more like regular/scheduled backup sink (encrypted data) like those cloud destinations I mentioned above to help with laptop malfunctioning or just dumping some data on it quickly when I want to take it with me (that's rare though).

I too am a bit confused by the non-popularity of such a setup. SD cards are okay for rarely changing data (or data that changes little, exactly like the incremental backups) and are extremely compact.

I view SD cards as the diskettes I always wanted to have some 26 or so years ago.

This stuff is just like firewire. Maybe it will be different in 5 or 10 years.

Three years ago I had one USB-C charging brick with a lightning and USB-A cable and my macbook magsafe brick.

Now I carry a USB-C charging brick with a lightning cable for ipad and iphone, my USB-C charging brick for my macbook pro with a USB-C PD? cable, a USB-C -> USB-C cable for my external SSD (which I cannot use to charge my macbook and the charging cable of my macbook does not work with it). Additionally I have a USB-C to USB-A adapter with a USB mini cable for my headphones and mifi dongle and a separate adapter for HDMI and SD.

I ended up with more cables and I would be in that situation for at least two years more until the last mini USB devices are discarded. But even in that case I end up with multiple USB-C cables just because they are incompatible to each other.

You also only need one high watt brick not lots of different rated ones.

There are many magnetic adapters you can buy, the good ones working better than the original MagSafe 2, which easily fell off when using MacBooks on your Lap, due to the connector being T shaped (instead of MagSafe 1 being L shaped, which worked great).

I also hope they don‘t bring back SD card readers and big clunky HDMI ports into the MacBook lineup, potentially reducing the amount of USB-C ports and making some models thicker.

When the iMac came out, everyone thought it was crazy not to have a serial port on the outside, since that was the standard for mouse and keyboard. But pretty soon, everything was available for USB. In fact, you might not have all those USB-A peripherals if Apple hadn't cut the cord, so to speak.

So I don't mind the loss of USB-A as much because USB-C is a strict upgrade. But for the SD card reader and the HDMI those are sort of separate and common use cases.

HDMI is probably the least controversial, although there will also be people who never connect external displays.

Agreed. All I really need is more USB-C ports. Both my current MacBook Air and my upcoming MacBook Pro have only two USB-C ports and I don’t understand why they didn’t make them with four USB-C ports.

Of course the real question is how much more quickly does thunderbolt get adopted when nobody's Macbooks have HDMI, which is probably one that Apple is asking themselves. They've never shied away from pushing industries forward to accommodate them.

While I'd probably prefer more ports, there's certainly an argument to keep things simple with USB-C and let most people buy their adapter of choice.

With respect to HDMI, it's very common in offices and for people speaking at events, but most consumers wouldn't use it much.

Completely false. Most cheaper CONSUMER monitors today come with only two inputs: HDMI and VGA. More expensive ones come with Displayport in addition. All TVs have HDMI ports. What else, aside from monitors and TVs, are consumers connecting their laptops to??

It surprises me that people who buy high-dollar computers are so reluctant to buy an extra cable. TB3 natively supports DP at faster speeds than HDMI 2.0b can push. You can buy a TB3 to DP1.4 cable online for $15. Even the most expensive cable for this purpose sold on Apple's web store costs $50. I suppose you can ask your office manager to buy a couple for the meeting rooms, in order to accommodate Mac users.

That $12 card reader, even expensive USB-3 card readers, are often a lot slower than that builtin one. They get lost and broken, not even considering that when you’re on the go, many photographers will absolutely try to shed as much unnecessary weight as possible, as not many people are built like the hulk or have an entourage of assistants doing the heavy lifting.

I use my laptop a lot outside of an office, and having that multitude of builtin ports is an absolute must, as dongles are quite difficult to deal with in situations when I don’t have a flat surface to put the laptop on. That TB/Ethernet dongle I regularly do have to use has been a great source of frustration.

I am also a photographer, and miss the SD port. But I realize that's kinda niche, and can understand it going away. I wouldn't be surprised to see cameras move away from SD cards eventually anyway.

As for whether I consider the nuances of "real life," I traveled by land across several countries with a DSLR, and took hundreds of photos a week. My DSLR has a CF slot and an SD slot; I used the SD slot for a wifi chip, and saved all photos to CF. My CF reader hasn't gotten lost or broken, and I didn't have "an entourage of assistants doing the heavy lifting" (whatever that means when talking about a card reader).

In real life, you can just use an external card reader. It's not a big limitation, just like it's not a big limitation that laptops these days don't have optical drives.

I appreciate that it’s good enough under some circumstances, but not always. Certainly not when taking several cards worth of photos a day, with only very limited time to do transfer, selection, and editing.

If anyone has found one that works properly, please let me know where I can get one!

Edit: Not sure why I am getting downvotes for this... Care to enlighten me?

Also maybe gamer TVs or more expensive models have USB-C inputs, I certainly have never seen one. Even in the monitor space, USB-C is seen as a premium feature. Even 5 years after the first laptops with USB-C.

Cameras are rapidly turning into a niche product, it makes no sense for any laptop manufacturer to include an SD card reader at this point.

They're also the standard boot device for computers like the Raspberry Pi. Basically, they're a professional tool which one might expect in a professional laptop.

What we do instead:

• DSLRs, when used as video cameras in professional workflows, are usually wired directly to a computer, streaming down the wire like a webcam.

• Purpose-built professional video cameras record directly to SSDs (either regular ones, like Samsung T7s; or proprietary ones, like RED’s “mini-mags”) that you’re expected to mount to your computer over USB — either by them being regular USB3 devices themselves; or, in the proprietary case, by the manufacturer selling a USB dock you’re supposed to buy for your editing workstations.

Regarding commercial photography: SD cards have gotten so large — and wi-fi sync so fast — that even the largest RAW photos sync instantly and hardly make a dent in your storage. There’s no real point in taking a 512GB SD card out of a camera.

Keep in mind, integrated ports are only really a demand of professionals when urgent, portable connectivity is a requirement; i.e. when even the time required to find and plug in a dongle would be SLAs broken and revenue lost. This was a true need for professional photography when SD cards were small, as you’d often fill up an SD card in the field and need to “dump it out” onto your laptop to continue shooting (or swap it for another while handing off the first to your editor to establish a pipeline.) Today, it’s not.

None of the other tasks you listed have ever been urgent, in-the-field tasks; they’re tasks where you do have time to go back home/to the office, and plug in an SD-card reader dongle to do the task.

My Sigma fp has to record 12-bit CinemaDNG to an external SSD (SD cards larger than 64 GB can’t maintain the required throughput and 64 GB is enough for probably minutes). I might use the SD recording capability if I take the camera for a leisure photowalk (as far from professional work as it gets); I keep reminding myself to simply get a Wi-Fi enabled SD card so that I never have to take it out.

A memory card format that might be a bit more relevant here is CFexpress; but then again, it’s unlikely that as a professional you’d ever use your laptop’s built-in reader for this as opposed to sticking it into a box that automatically copies everything onto a 4TB HDD while you fill up another card.

By the way, tethered operation (wired or wireless) is used in professional photography as well, not just videography.

So it turns out it's easier to just buy a multi-card adapter. My computer's built-in SD port never gets any use anymore, not even for full-size, non-UHC SD cards.

The same graph for the rest of the year. http://www.cipa.jp/stats/documents/e/dw-202011_e.pdf

Camera sales are lower than previous years. AI pictures look unnerving; but it's definitely the way things will go.

You'll see in the next few years that smartphones, tablets, laptops will cater less and less to your needs. Sad... But probably inevitable.

Do you think something like “gosh, I _hate_ all these additional ports” about MBP 2015? There’s a reason it is still holds (not much, but) some value on second-hand market.

I'll almost certainly get an Apple Silicon laptop at some point but I'm not in any rush especially at a time when I'm not traveling.

Not much? A base model 15" 2015 RMBP is still easily $800+ on eBay. Unheard of for a 6 year old laptop.

It’s easy enough to find usb-c rubber gaskets to keep sea salt air out, but not for arbitrary ports or slots.

https://smile.amazon.com/gp/product/B07BPNBNJ5/

I’m also all in on USB-c (even my shaver uses it for charging) and don’t miss MagSafe at all. Charging from either side is surprisingly handy. One charger for everything is a traveling game changer. $50 worth of charger and dongles has a permanent spot in my luggage.

Hopefully MagSafe in this case means wireless iPhone charging. I just don’t need MagSafe power in. I especially don’t need it now that the battery life is so long. I charge at my desk and if I use my MacBook somewhere else I don’t even take a charger with me.

That being said I wouldn’t mind one USB-a and one HDMI port. Since the rumour is for a less rounded design I guess the edge thickness may be enough to easily support those.

It's funny how different people's experiences can be. Maybe it's because I'm not in the Apple ecosystem and tend to use my devices until they break, but I own a single device that uses usb-c: a raspberry pi 4b. There are two other usb-c ports in my house, one on my laptop and one on my desktop, but I've never used them. I don't even own a separate usb-c cable (the pi charger is integrated).

I kind of dread making the switch for peripherals because I'm going to have to replace everything.

You mean, you'll have to replace the cables. Not the devices themselves, unless you want to be able to use USB-C-to-C cables everywhere.

Right now, all of the "source" devices (for lack of a better word) have USB-A "out" — laptop, desktop, charging bricks — and all the peripherals — phone, tablet, bluetooth speaker, xbox controller… — have USB-Micro "in". Thus, the only type of usb cable that I need is A->Micro.

If/when I replace my phone, I have my first USB-C peripheral, but the others haven't disappeared, so now I need both my old A->Micro cables and A->C for my phone. Same for my laptop, on the source end — now I need C->C and C->Micro, too. It gets worse: it's rare that I want to charge/connect all my peripherals at once, but it's common that I'll want to charge any two. Plus, you always want a spare.

So now instead of ~3 cables, I'm going to end up with probably 7 or 8, and when I go to grab one out of the drawer I'll need to check both ends of the cable to know I'm getting the right one… ugh. The only way to keep the combinations under control is to replace all source devices or all peripherals at once (or take the middle ground and buy a bunch of C->Micro dongles, pair one with each peripheral, and now they're faux-C peripherals). None of these options are particularly appealing to me.

I'm being a little melodramatic. It's not really that big of a deal. I'll live through it and eventually I'll make it out the other end and maybe I'll be in a C->C golden era. I'm just not looking forward to the transition when USB cable story right now is pretty simple (even if I dislike Micro; Mini was a far nicer connector).

Some thing that _will_ be easier though, is your laptop. When you get a new one, get one that charges over USB-C. That option was obviously never available with micro-USB.

USB Type-C receptacle to USB legacy adapters are explicitly not defined or allowed. Such adapters would allow many invalid and potentially unsafe cable connections to be constructed by users.

[1]: https://www.usb.org/sites/default/files/USB%20Type-C%20Spec%...

That would require a massive change, since you can't transmit power through metal. I can't really see the top surface being made out of glass, thus the only other place for charging would be the touchpad.

It has a 256GB SSD drive, and a 1 TB SD Card inside that I use for storing photos, video, music, etc. essentially everything that does not need fast storage.

This laptop was only meant to be a 1 year temporary solution, so I’ve been waiting 9 years to upgrade.

I’ve yet to find a new reasonably priced MacBook with 1,256Gb of built in storage.

Carrying an external drive sucks.

Unless Apple makes 1-2 Tb SSDs lower in price to the 100$ mark, the lack of an SD card is a killer for me.

Paying 500$ for an extra 256GB SSD when I can get 1 Tb SD card for 100$ is just ridiculous.

If you need a certain price point for a certain feature, why not expand to not limiting your search to only one manufacturer, which seems to be your binding constraint here since you’ve delayed updating 7 years, instead of expecting a manufacturer that has less than 10% of the total market share of an industry to meet you needs?

Software. People become accustomed to the closed ecosystem of OSX, which you can't duplicate on others' hardware. This is a key facet of Apple's business model and as GP poster illustrates, it works. Apple can screw up the hardware for 7 years, and GP poster will simply wait for them to come back to doing it right.

A different vendor product with cheaper storage can still be a much worse value proposition than my 2012 MacBook Air.

The problem here is that the Parent you are replying to assumes “storage” is the only issue why I haven’t upgraded. That’s an incorrect assumption.

I haven’t upgraded because paying >1000$ should add value over my MacBook Air 2012, yet for me all laptops in the market do not add enough value to justify the cost.

A new MacBook with 1 TB SSD storage sets you over 2000$, but the value just isn’t there.

Everybody’s mom is recommending an M1 these days, yet crappy webcam, support for 1 monitor only, expensive storage, low ram, being 1st gen of apples arm lineage with 1st gen flaws, no MagSafe, ... make it a bad value proposition right now for me compared with my 2012 air which doesn’t have most of these flaws.. sure it is better in many aspects, but it is also much worse in others (eg 1 external monitor support is a deal breaker for me)

The price difference between 8GB/256GB and 16GB/1TB is insane.

I didn't like having only 256GB SSD either in my Razer laptop and just bought a 2TB one, changed it in a few hours myself, and never thought about SSD space since.

I agree that they should not remove USB-C charging. People by now have powerbanks, or USB-C ports in their car that would stop working. However, my daily driver still is the 87W charger that came with the MBP, for the simple reason that it’s the fastest option to charge. I‘d be glad if they switched that to MagSafe - just yesterday, one of my kids almost pulled the MBP from a table while I was looking away.

Maybe we'll see one for USB-C some day.

Cameras also have CF and now CFexpress. I’ve personally never used an SD card in any of my cameras so USB card readers have been part of my workflow for many many years.

It’s a difficult one to get right. Moving to all in on USB-C TB achieves pleasing nobody equally.

I also can't wait for the removal of the Touchbar. This prevented me from buying previous Macbooks because it was just one compromise too far for such an expensive machine.

Is this Apple's "Coke Classic" moment?

It is very rare for a PC laptop power cable to break. There's a rubber grommet which protects the cable as it enters the plug from extreme and repeated bending.

For supposed aesthetics, Apple don't include this, and their cables fray easily.

(This is based on my experience managing hardware for a small organization, <50 staff. After about 5 years, Apple laptops come back with damage to the shiny screen from rubbing against the keyboard, and usually a wrecked power supply cable. Sometimes we have to replace the PSU within the 5 years. The rest of the laptop is usually in good condition, i.e. the case, keyboard, ports.

Dell/HP/Lenovo/etc business laptops come back with the cables in good condition, the matt screens suffer less even with similar keyboard marks, but the cases usually look a bit scruffy. Depending on usage, we might have replaced the battery after ~3 years, which is either easily done by the user, or takes 5 minutes with a normal screwdriver to remove the back case.)

I have a stack of old laptops 2 feet high, and my old Dell that frayed at the strain relief is the only one whose cable crapped out.

- There will be additional I/O ports

I’m pretty sure that simply more USB-C ports also fits that description. I don’t know why someone would assume that means SD card slots are coming back. I don’t see a future where Apple has SD slots on notebooks.

I’m fine with them adding ports back as long as they still let you do PD into the TB3 ports. It’s still not super easy to determine exactly what features are supported by different devices/adapters/cables, especially when dealing with USB-C. However, it seems like a bit of a backslide on a bold move to push the state of the art forward that I believe was the right move.

Re: MagSafe, I honestly think they would be better off making a MagSafe adapter—a pair of small terminals which connect to the end of the power cable and the port that connect to each other magnetically. I imagine they could make this pretty low-profile and clean. But then it wouldn’t be exclusive to Apple’s own hardware, so I doubt they would ever go this route. A quick search turned up an existing adapter [1] that supports 100W PD and 40 GBPs data transfer so it’s definitely doable.

[1] https://www.newsshooter.com/2020/03/30/magrig-magnetic-usb-c...

Attention is limited. Focus is limited. Flow is limited.

Don't break that Apple.

Do you know that clicking the TouchID button will lock your screen?

It wouldn't affect your not using the port for them to include it. Adding magsafe doesn't mean not supporting usb-c charging, or removing any usb-c ports.

Your take obviously isn't that controversial: the maker of the best laptops in the world agrees with you, or at least they did at one time.

Who exactly would that be in your opinion?

If Louis Rossman had a more permanent fix with a third-party compatible port part that is far more durable, I'd send my now-un-AppleCare'd laptop to him in a heartbeat.

[1] https://appletoolbox.com/are-your-macbook-usb-c-ports-loose/

Seems like a reasonable tradeoff to me.

But I need an SD card reader all the time, my camera and my field recorder both use them and it makes it super simple to transfer data - without having to carry an extra cable. I don't see why a device that claims it is aimed at professionals (especially creative professionals) could justify omitting it.

My solution is a dongle, but as you say, then you have to travel with an extra cable.

Ok, but I never need one for my profession so I don't want the port. Which one of us gets it the way we want it? We both can't have it our way. They went for people who want to use it are the ones to use a dongle, which seems fair to me - the person who wants it pays for it.

You do bring good points about usb-c/magsafe. I hope they can make magsafe work with the usb-c port.

Sometimes removing ports is dumb, sometimes it’s a smart reflection of what trends are clearly already happening.

The side effect is that I can't buy the flagship models anymore since they usually don't have headphone jacks. Oh well. Also, yes I have bluetooth headphones. One of which also supports 3.5mm input. I use both. With my phone I primarily use the bluetooth, with my laptop and tablet I use the 3.5mm jack and if I am in a car without bluetooth or a friend's house, I can hook up the 3.5mm cable to my phone.

I can justify any inconvenience. I can justify additional expense. But in this case, I choose not to. If you choose to justify the inconvenience, that's on you—but acknowledge that it exists.

Already mentioned elsewhere, MagSafe could just mean there will be a charger for the iPhone in handset portion of the new MBP. Ports can also mean a lot of things, even releasing an Apple branded dock of some sort. Imagine a branded dock that you just set the MBP on and it charges and has a bunch of ports that can be used? That is much more Applely than adding usb-a back.

The Touch Bar has been on life support for awhile. When Apple never released a version for the desktop, they relegated it to a niche feature regardless of how useful it could have been.

The amount of dongles and crap I have to carry around with me to make effective use of a “pro” laptop is ridiculous. Good on Apple for fixing it.

How those two work together? Do you take external monitor , trackpad and keyboard with you ? It looks like most of the time you are not using your laptop as a laptop, when you need everything on the go and you wish to be prepared for diff scenarios. Then you wish laptop as much packed as possible and preferably nothing else, so you would avoid caring many dongles with you.

I haven’t tried one, but they look like an adequate middle ground.

All I can say is that I am glad it was the dock that fried not any of the laptops that use it...

That all said, it was pretty glorious when it worked -- a single magnetic cable that did dual 4k monitors, charging, videoconf setup, network, license dongles, etc

USB-C connectors have pins of different lengths so device can detect them being disconnected, and do things like turn the power off. They also make guarantees that the ground pins are first to connect, and last to disconnect.

My guess would be that you disconnected your laptop while it was pulling lots of power. The pins got disconnected in the wrong order, which resulted in the electronics in the dock getting fried or a high voltage line for power delivery got momentarily connected to a data line, and fried something.

Tried several and they're no good.

Or am I worrying about this unnecessarily?

You are. Provide a lot of amps. Each device will take just as much as it needs. So err on the side of more watts - it will even help your batteries charge faster.

The only thing that can be diminished with fast charging is the number of battery cycles (the battery lifetime) so set a low charging engage (only charge if <= 50%) and a high ceiling (stop charge if >90%) in your bios: this will increase your battery life.

Source: all my devices use USB-C. They all share the same AC adapter with power delivery, and a Lenovo Dock also USB-C with PD.

No USB-C charging = I don't buy.

The batteries of my 7 years old previous laptop, which was used mostly stationarily and mostly kept at 75-80% state of charge, are still at above 90% capacity. I don't fully trust the >90% reported, but the batteries are quite obviously still good.

The reason was airplane seats. They have a breaker that flips at 75W.

I wouldn't get fast charging with the 60W adapter, but I wouldn't run out of juice on a 14-hour flight.

The devices that are being powered are the ones controlling the charging, the charging brick will derate itself if devices demand more than it can handle. It might hurt the brick, it will get hot or perhaps noisy if it’s a cheaper one.

It’s like openning every single faucet at your house, as long as the pressure and flow at the source are ok, the faucets will output the same as in any other case, otherwise each faucet will “slow down”.

Basic charging works on the principle of deciding a charging voltage (which is either 5v or negotiate to be higher via Power Delivery) plus as many amps as the charger can provided.

As a receiving device the only thing you really care about it voltage. If it’s to high, then stuff gets fried, two low and stuff just doesn’t turn on.

The amps are determined by how much the receiving device can consume. And of course decreases as the device charges (if you’ve got a full battery, then you don’t need more power). If the receiving device pulls to many amps, then the voltage will start to drop, this then causes the receiving device to reduce its power consumption.

Ultimately power electronics are extremely robust today, you would have to try very hard to fry modern electronics. This is a result of how modern electronics converts power, which naturally makes them very robust to fluctuating inputs. (I’m simplifying a lot, want to learn more then look up DC-DC converters, and see how they’re implemented in silicon)

In short, just don’t worry.

I am all in with usb-c connector.

Industry is moving forward. Don’t rewind.

P.S. The article behind the link is based on rumors spread by “trusted” Apple “analyst”. Treat those accordingly.

The trackpad preferences allows one or more corners to be assigned to locking the screen. One swipe away works well.

Is this a frequent occurrence for you? I have a 6 year old MBP and all of the ports still work great. I would naively guess that P(port breaking) << P(dongle breaking).

Ironically, that reader didn’t support microSD cards used by my audio recorder (Tascam DR-05), so once I lost the microSD to SD size adapter (which happened very quickly) I had to use a universal memory card reader dongle anyway.

I never sent it for repair: this was my daily driver so I had to have a backup machine in meantime, but when I got another laptop I simply switched to it.

My latest USB-C SD/microSD reader dongle feels surprisingly sturdy, though admittedly it is liable to getting lost (it’s been a year and it did not happen yet, but I’m sure it will at some point).

I’d say definitely P(port breaking) < P(dongle breaking or getting lost), but on the other hand port breaking has higher cost.

Maybe a magsafe like adapter for usb-c then ?

That would be my preferred solution. USB-C port on the laptop, small MagSafe adapter, and then the charge cord with the other half of the MagSafe.

I bet during their market research, Apple had people like you in their focus groups.

I need to use SD cards for my camera and RPis. That's a significant amount of users that would buy Macs, even if you don't use them.

> and have gone all-in on USB-C

The move to Thunderbolt 3 / USB-C seemed to be hinged on the assumption that all new products would be USB-C. The prior removal of the headphone jack[1] and replacement of the lightning-adapter airbuds included with new iPhones set precedent to allow them to continue to simplify. But there's a big difference between (a) providing a replacement that effectively works the same way and (b) having a market based on being best and svelte, but expecting that the average customer can and will buy replacement lanky adapters and big ugly hubs that get in the way (especially when the cheaper ones can cause more interference[2]).

Apple once had a "Think Different" campaign, and perhaps that transmogrified to "Be the Change" in the 2010s. "Think Different" was about producing the best product, with a quality product that worked better, not about forcing customers to take on the burden of a mess, making their lives more difficult and looking out-of-control. "Be the Change" is activism which often causes problems for some, with a goal of things becoming better. "Think Different" works better in product design and development. "Be the Change" is for Human Resources and Marketing.

> Please just do MagSage + USB-C, so I can maintain my one-cable-for-everything, making traveling lighter and simpler. Here's my counter argument to all those that love MagSafe: makes traveling a huge hassle, forcing me to carry a special charge brick that only works for ONE device. In 2021 going forward, I will flat refuse to spend money on anything that doesn't use USB-C or Qi charging

It's expected to have Thunderbolt 3 (in form of USB-C) on it. I'd assume that they will allow charging the computer from it, as that's part of the spec of Thunderbolt 3; I'm not 100% on that, but as keeping that capability would be part of the Thunderbolt 3 spec which includes Thunderbolt, USB, DisplayPort, and 100W power input[3]. It just wouldn't charge as quickly.

This MagSafe will probably be the Qi-supporting MagSafe[3][4] which can be 15W for faster charging or 7.5W for Qi and will probably support the ring chargers, probably under the touchpad, given design choices from existing charging stands[5].

> I can now travel with a single 2xUSB-C power brick

And you would probably be able to do that, but it will charge faster with MagSafe.

> I am all for removing the TouchBar

Yep. I couldn't easily change brightness or volume when in context specific mode with the settings I had by default, and it was distracting.

It can be emulated[6].

[1]- 1/8" headphone that in some Macs had optical out: https://support.apple.com/en-za/guide/mac-help/cpmh0052/11.0...

[2]- https://www.zdnet.com/article/usb-3-and-usb-c-devices-can-ca...

[3]- https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208368

[4]- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MagSafe

[5]- https://amazon.com/Kensington-SmartFit-Ergonomic-15-6-Inch-W...

[6]- https://github.com/sindresorhus/touch-bar-simulator

you mean one-cable-plus-12-50€-adapters right ? ffs most projectors are still VGA