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 Thexalon on Tuesday November 08 2016, @05:45PM
The thing is, in order for Apple to really recover, I think you'd need to resurrect Steve Jobs, and I don't see that happening anytime soon. Once a large corporation becomes thoroughly established, the kinds of people that rise to the top are no longer creative visionaries but instead ruthless politicians who know how to backstab better than their peers, and Apple is no exception to this.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 08 2016, @06:59PM
True enough, Steve Jobs mastered product development. Instead of starting with Engineering, they started with use-case and worked backwards. This is totally opposite of the his paradigm, and I am sure he is spinning in his grave right about now.