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Comment by wkoszek | Hacker News Reader

Makes me wonder how people here feel about the USB-C and basically all gadgets requiring adapters. I like Apple and Mac, but this piece.. Isn't it ugly at the end, that if you want to use an SD card from your camera you must get an adapter, adapter for your iPhone 7 lighting headphones and adapter for your $1k 27" Retina display which isn't 5k, but still pretty freaking good. That's 3 ports, and 1 USB-C port left you'll use for charging.

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"how people here feel about the USB-C"

The idea of only needing one type of port is very appealing. No longer need to worry about ThunderBolt, DisplayPort, Mini DisplayPort, VGA, HDMI, USB, Firewire 400, Firewire 800, Ethernet. ("What? We don't have all of those any more!" I hear you say. Yup! Isn't it grand?)

I'm ambivalent about losing MagSafe, but that's it.

"if you want to use an SD card from your camera you must get an adapter"

I can see how the SD card port is useful. That said, I remember the days when I had a camera with CompactFlash. Never had a computer than had a built in reader for that, and it wasn't that bad.

As for adapters for other accessories, now all of the adapters will be X to USB2/TB3. The piles of adapters from this to that that I've collected over the years amazes me, in particular for displays and old FW drives. I'll be able to get rid of a lot of old adapters going forward.

A tweet I saw today made me smile:

"If someone isn’t raging about a hardware port, it’s not really a successful Apple event."

https://twitter.com/rands/status/791733073972908032

Edit to add: Yup. Gonna be buying adapters. Won't be the first time, but going forward it's looking like that's going to be much more sane going forward.

Hm. Didn't get that. It's not that you've had USB->VGA or Thunderbolt->VGA etc adapters and you were confused which to buy. There was always 1 VGA adapter for projectors, 1 HDMI adapter for TV etc. (exception confirms the rule: there's combo Thunderbolt->VGA/USB-C/Lightning port) This won't change. It's basically the same now: you need all those adapters. So I'm going to throw away >= $100 of adapters to buy new >= $100 of adapters or more.

I feel like I'd dislike Apple less if there was cable and adapter buyback program.

I can see what you're saying. To paraphrase, I have this type of peripheral, I need to connect from that to that type of I/O port on my laptop. Over the years, I've seen a lot of different types of I/O. It might sound silly, and perhaps you'll fault me, but it's sometimes been the case that I don't remember what kind of port my current laptop uses for a particular interface type. (And is it my work machine or my personal one?)

For example:

Data: a couple different types of SCSI, FW400, FW800, USB, serial

Network: coaxial, RJ-45, RJ-11

Display: VGA, a couple types of DVI, HDMI.

Audio: 3.5mm out, mic in

This article from the Verge

And I know it's not including some of the variants of these.

http://www.theverge.com/2016/6/29/12054410/apple-tech-death-...

Now having a common input to the laptop simplifies this a lot. Yeah, if the type of input changes again and we want to continue to use existing peripherals, we'll have to get new adapters. And I fully expect to. Until we no longer need to physically connect devices together, ports are going to change. I do think it's going to be easier to keep track of going forward.

I agree it looks like Apple has more port turnover than other manufacturers, and I wouldn't be surprised if that's actually the case. I don't expect everyone to agree with me when I say it's not a deal killer for me.

It doesn't make any sense to me tbh, why doesn't it have more than 4 ports in general, from the outside it doesn't look like there is no room for them, the USB-C ports are even smaller than all the ports that were there before.

Also 2 not 4 USB-C ports and a Headphone Jack ports on the lower end model (still $1500), are you freaking kidding me?

The 2015 MBP has: 1x MagSafe, 2x USB3, 2x Thunderbolt/DisplayPort, 1x HDMI, SD Card Reader, Headphone Jack.

The USB-C charging option is fine, but why not also include MagSafe? I tripped over the charger cable plenty of times, it just unplugs, now that's actually a great feature.

I have a camera and plenty of SD cards so I use the SD card reader all the time, I actually think I wouldn't want a laptop without it anymore.

My Monitor supports DP, HDMI and DVI, I can pretty much plug it straight into any current laptop on this planet except for the MBP 2016 and MacBook 12".

This is a bit underwhelming.

Also judging by se size difference of the ports, USB-A to C adapters are going to be pretty clunky.

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