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

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?


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  • (Score: 2) by rleigh on Tuesday November 08 2016, @09:52PM

    by rleigh (4887) on Tuesday November 08 2016, @09:52PM (#424263) Homepage

    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.

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