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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: 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...