Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

SoylentNews is powered by your submissions, so send in your scoop. Only 18 submissions in the queue.

Dongle Dilemma Provokes Apple Price Cut

posted by cmn32480 on Tuesday November 08 2016, @03:46PM   Printer-friendly
from the one-more-thing-to-lose dept.

Phoenix666 writes:

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?

Original Submission

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Dongle Dilemma Provokes Apple Price Cut | Log In/Create an Account | Top | 75 comments | Search Discussion
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.

  • (Score: 1) by RS3 on Tuesday November 08 2016, @07:06PM

    by RS3 (6367) on Tuesday November 08 2016, @07:06PM (#424188)

    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.