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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: 2) by VLM on Tuesday November 08 2016, @07:38PM
Close, I screwed up in posting my results because I should have specified I was comparing a $1500 dell to a $1500 mac, not a $1800+ dell to a $1500 mac which seems a bit unfair.
I would agree with you in theory that if money is no object you can find some kind of gaming laptop or something that nearly approaches the specs of an apple laptop, for hundreds to thousands of dollars more of course.
Its weird that in the olden times the specs/$ ratio strongly disfavored apple hardware, and now its the other way around. Other than that lovely ratio, I'm not a huge fan of Apple. My wife likes her mac mini and my kids like their ipads but I have no apple products personally.
(Score: 3, Informative) by tibman on Tuesday November 08 2016, @08:27PM
Maybe you also didn't notice the cheapest MBP has integrated graphics (that steals from system ram) and the CPU has only two cores at 2GHz. The worst dell on that page has four CPU cores at 2.3GHz with dedicated video (2GB DDR5 dedicated video ram). Nearly everything is better on the dell. Just noticed the ram itself. MBP has 8GB DDR3 at 1866 MHz while the dell has 8GB DDR4 at 2133 MHz.
If the MBP is trying to use the latest and greatest tech maybe they should try that with real hardware instead of just the peripheral ports.
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(Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday November 09 2016, @01:31PM
Yeah I acknowledge you're probably correct but I don't care about those specs. I make stacks of cash using my fingers on keyboard and eyes on screen so I hate using cheap junk for either, nothing but top of the line please. You can translate those specs into time, like what you're talking about will kill CPU performance from 2017 levels to merely 2013 levels. I don't care because in 2013 I had a top of the line matte non-glossy high res high DPI monitor, genuine model M keyboard keyboard of the gods (aka no chance of carpal tunnel), and the CPU was fast enough in 2013 to make fat stacks of cash. I just can't downgrade my keyboard to atari400 levels or my display back to the days of CGA, not anymore. I wasn't CPU limited in 2013 and I won't be in 2017 either.
Its like rating laptops based on thinness. Yes thats very nice that someone minmaxed to a ridiculous value. Sorry, can't make me care about something that don't matter.
The CPU doesn't matter to me because I do all my work logged into bigger machines. Virtual images larger by far than anything you could imagine getting in laptop format. Even my dev and test servers are bigger because you can't realistically estimate performance without something similar to the PROD herd, similar test datasets for example.
I guess in summary I'm paid to read the display and make code appear on it, so I care immensely about keyboard and display, but I'm not paid to make the RAM access 18% faster, in fact back when that was 75% slower it was not an impairment to my job.
(Score: 4, Informative) by Cornwallis on Tuesday November 08 2016, @08:33PM
I was comparing a $2700 Mac to a $2700 Dell. I just priced them all the past few days and bought the Dell. I'm not a gamer at all but I use the thing for graphics and DTP along with some coding. The Dell allows upgrading and adding a 2nd HD - stuff I like. Plus there's the whole function & escape keys thing...
Macbook Pro - $2799
2.7GHz quad-core Intel Core i7 processor, Turbo Boost up to 3.6GHz
16GB 2133MHz memory
512GB PCIe-based SSD
Radeon Pro 455 with 2GB memory
2880-by-1800 native resolution with LED-backlit
Dell Precision 5510 - $2728
Intel® Xeon® Quad Core Processor Xeon E3-1505M v5 Quad Core 2.80GHz, 3.70GHz Turbo
32GB Memory DDR4-2133MHz SDRAM
512GB PCIe-based SSD
Nvidia® Quadro® M1000M w/2GB GDDR5
UHD IGZO(3840x2160) Touch Wide View LED-backlit
(Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday November 09 2016, @01:38PM
That's a nice system. Either of them. Looks like there's more parity that I expected at the extremely high end. My wife would likely enjoy that as a video editing workstation, the specs look real good for that.
On one hand, as a fraction of my total salary and benefits package thats nothing so I could probably get it if I asked for it. On the other hand I'd mostly be using it to run chrome or FF, maybe a local emacs, SSH, and rdesktop, so its hard to justify the specs aside from the obvious display quality advantages, and one of them has a real keyboard...