How Apple could have avoided much of the controversy

This was a really smart article.

It seems to me that a lot of the exaggerated angst around HN about this announcement (visible nearby) is due to the fact that the professed desires of high-capacity hardware users (diverse ports, lots of RAM, expansion) have been ignored by Apple's new product.

Some of this is real (i.e., SW developers are not Apple's main audience for this machine). But much of it is people who have never used the product extrapolating what they feel they need, and finding the machine wanting. People appear to be forgetting that Apple clearly does a lot of research into what is possible, and usage patterns with new hardware.

Here is an interesting statement from the article that rings true for me:

"A lot of it boils down to this concept: We demand Apple innovate, but we insist they don’t change anything."

There's plenty of people that do want a portable office machine, they're docked/pluged in at their desk or home most of the day, and may have it in a meeting for an hour or so...

Beyond this, I don't have too much issue with limited ports, I think that 2-3 is probably ideal. I do think that a regular headphone+mic port is important, as you're talking plenty of no-power devices that a lot of us use.

The apple core desktop market these days seems to include a lot of developers. Partly through need (ios app development) and partly by choice (friendly unix environment).

I'm still upset at a missing mid-range option that doesn't have a built in monitor... and a better solution to the pro line that is expressly upgradable.

Yet another article denigrating detractors as "nerds". I switched right off when I got to that part.

Dongles are fine, but I wish they gave the iPhone and Macbook two ports each. Charging the iPhone while listening to music and charging Macbook while connected to iPhone are very common scenarios.

Healthy for the ecosystem? Haha when was the last time Apple listened to the customers. Before with Jobs it was my way or the highway and that was fine since it was his firm and his vision we all got behind. But this new Apple is fighting to stay relevant in an environment with newcomers like MS and Google so I think we might have seen peak Apple actually.