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A tweet posted shortly after Apple's recent Macbook launch event underlined the absurdity: Apple now sells 17 different types of dongle.
In its ever-escalating war against connectivity ports, Apple's latest computers do away with the SD card port, a full-size USB port, and the HDMI port.
Instead, you'll need a dongle to convert those "legacy" connectors, as Apple put it on Friday, into the new, smaller USB-C port.
"We recognize that many users, especially pros, rely on legacy connectors to get work done today and they face a transition," the company said in a statement, without acknowledging that Apple's newest iPhone, released just last month, is one such "legacy" device - without a dongle (or a different cable, sold separately), you can't connect Apple's new smartphone to Apple's new laptop.
"We want to help them move to the latest technology and peripherals, as well as accelerate the growth of this new ecosystem."
That help will be a decent discount on the price of the dongles - it calls them adapters - until the end of this year.
How long before they release new dongles that must be individually charged?
(Score: 5, Insightful) by julian on Tuesday November 08 2016, @04:24PM
I don't mind the lack of USB-A. USB-C is forward thinking, it'll be standard everywhere soon. But Ethernet, SD card, are not legacy ports. I also need a real keyboard. Professionals who need power want more than 16GB of RAM, more than a dual core CPU, and better GPUs. Losing MagSafe is just baffling, it was probably the greatest feature they ever put in a laptop and really helps when traveling.
You can't please all the people all the time, but Apple has managed to make a machine that is optimal for no one.
(Score: 5, Funny) by Nerdfest on Tuesday November 08 2016, @04:56PM
I'm sure it's perfect for sitting in a Starbucks while sporting a hipster-douchebag beard and skinny jeans.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by julian on Tuesday November 08 2016, @05:03PM
Sure, but so is the MacBook.
But lets say you're a professional who doesn't care about hardware power or ports. You're a professional writer or journalist, for example. Well the keyboard sucks, the one thing you really need for your job.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by VLM on Tuesday November 08 2016, @06:56PM
has managed to make a machine that is optimal for no one
I'm in the planning stages for a build where I'm going to mash together an embedded systems high res LCD (unfortunately it'll be like $600 for 1080 and 12 volt DC power) and a top of the line full scale mechanical keyboard and a raspberry pi (or equiv) and some quadcopter lithium batteries for power. The mechanics of this will make an interesting carpentry project.
My criteria are actively being disinterested in thinness, don't care about CPU power or memory because all I'll ever do is SSH / redesktop into bigger machines, I need a good / real keyboard, and I need a good / real display (none of this x720 crap in 2017). Also I just want to build one, which is all the reason I actually need. I'll also have a USB hub and both parallel printer and serial ports onboard.
Should be a pretty nice laptop for me. For other people, probably not, but Apple style, I don't have to care about that.
This is currently at a status of one step more serious than in my infinite spare time. So I've started looking seriously and building up bill of materials and start thinking about the CAD to get mounting holes and stuff. I don't have my notes but I have a nice embedded monitor and matching-ish numberpadless mechanical keyboard combo and have been doing some research on the case. The case is likely to be tropical hardwood like a campaign furniture (brass corners, etc) lapdesk / secretary thingy (hard to explain, but basically a box that unfolds into a desk where the desk happens to have a monitor and keyboard) The CAD to get all this to line up and route cables and all that junk is surprisingly tedious. Oh boy is it fun to mix imperial woodworking material and fitting sizes with mostly metric hardware components...
No one wants to sell a thick laptop with lots of built in ports and no dongles required and a nice display and keyboard and I don't care about CPU or video card with a removable swap-able battery, so F them, I have the means to make one for myself to the specs I want, so I will.
Another novelty to think about is because of the FAA no one will sell a laptop with more than a tenth KWh of battery, but since I won't be flying with it I have no fucks to give on that particular topic so a portable KWh or so should run a raspberry pi and a nice display for quite a long time (Days? Weeks?) In order to avoid incinerating my laptop I'll probably remove it to charge. I've been looking at electric bicycle batteries instead of quads and the big problem I have is they're all in series to give 48 volts and I'm not trying to run a telco central office here so I'd be much happier with a small number of giant cells. On the other hand one of my kids wants to do an ebike conversion so I'm thinking I could share the battery and/or the charger and/or the fire proof charger storage box... 50 volts at 20 amp-hours thats a lot of raspberry pi runtime... that size is a little heavy, but as long as I keep it under "osborne 1980s luggable CPM machine" size I'll be OK.
There was an era in the 80s/90s where assembling your own computer out of parts was often either the only way to avoid something that was shit (like a winmodem or crapware infested OS) or a good way to save money, and we may be entering an era like that for laptops...
(Score: 1) by RS3 on Tuesday November 08 2016, @07:06PM
It's fairly obvious that the design team at Apple have more power than the function team. As someone who has to deal with Apple stuff from time to time (like when I'm in charge of A/V for some event and there's a projector with a fairly standard DB-15HD VGA connector and someone comes with an Apple something and NO adapters) I'm glad Apple is responding to the market. It's not a lot of $ either way and it shows they're listening.
That said, Dongles get lost, forgotten, broken, stolen... I think they should offer optional models, or a stack of options for the one MacBook. Like a very clean portless version, and models with more and more ports, maybe even à la carte, and offer "legacy" ports, like VGA. I've seen PC/Windows machines with doors covering many ports- they could do that if their designers are so sure the market demands super-slick externals. Plus it's nice to keep the crud out of connectors.
(Score: 2) by rleigh on Tuesday November 08 2016, @09:52PM
I do mind the lack of USB-A. Almost every peripheral I own uses it, and I'm not going to replace my monitor, printer, scanner, keyboard, mouse, USB pendrives and other storage, and other miscellaneous gadgets, just because Apple deemed it "legacy". I use this stuff all the time, and needing a rats nest of adapters and hubs is not tenable.
It would have been forward-thinking to include a couple of USB-C ports, plus a couple of USB-A ports, thus catering for the new and the old and not causing problems for either case. In a decade, maybe USB-C will have displaced USB-A, particularly for items with a shorter lifetime, but the 2 decade base of USB-A peripherals makes removing it at this time an exercise in masochism for anyone who needs to use it with today's devices.
I have a 2011 macbook pro, top spec with a decent range of ports. 2xUSB-A, firewire, ethernet, mini-displayport, audio in/out, SD card. It was mostly acceptable, but even this was a compromise compared with older systems such as Thinkpads. I've used all of the ports at one time or another, most of them regularly, except maybe the SD card and audio in (I have a USB mic). The new macbook pro makes so many compromises, and delivers such little in the way of actual benefits, I'd struggle to use it productively and find it massively limiting and frustrating. I might not be Apple's target demographic (I do use it professionally, it's a work-issued system), but I've absolutely hammered this system over the last five years and do use all that stuff.
I've been looking at getting a new system for home use, and a mac mini, mac pro or macbook were on the cards if they upgraded them to be a decent spec. However, they are all absolutely woeful and are outrageously expensive to boot. My next machine will likely be one of the new Dell XPS developer edition laptops running Ubuntu. Higher spec and less costly than the macbook, and while it makes some compromises it's much more tolerable than this poor effort by Apple. And it's not just the hardware. As a developer, the base Unix part of MacOS is badly neglected, with fundamental stuff not having been upgraded in over a decade, even though it's sitting there in FreeBSD, ready for the taking. That's a decade's worth of bugfixes and improvements which are missing; compared with current FreeBSD it's a relic full of frustrating bugs and limitations. I expect better, given how big the company is and how much they charge for their products and have sitting in the bank. They could do much better, but they are sitting on their laurels.