Dongle dilemma provokes Apple price cut | Hacker News Reader

Dongle dilemma provokes Apple price cut

bbc.co.uk

39 pointsstesch28 comments

Apple is becoming more and more of a fashion accessory. They do very well with this approach. When they dropped the audio jack in the iPhone 7 for a dongle mediated or wireless interface I thought they jumped the shark. It appears their sales are suffering because of it. Until 2012 or so I had a laptop with a serial port, because working with serial devices was unreliable with usb to serial dongles. Declaring that standard usb ports are legacy will only slow sales of laptops. Very few people want to keep up with a wad of dongles. Laptops should be convenient. It is relatively easy to plug into any presentation display with an hdmi cable and I am happy to have a VGA port on my circa 2012 laptop (ram and ssd upgraded). When people can't use their machine like everyone else, they don't think "Ohh I have such a modern laptop". They think "This is inconvenient and unproductive. I will think twice about buying this in the future."

> Declaring that standard usb ports are legacy

The new MacBook Pros still have standard USB ports. In fact they have twice as many as before. USB C is still standard USB. I think people think Apple have made their own new incompatible port and that isn't true.

From the context it is clear he was referring to previous generation rectangular USB ports.

"Declaring that previous generation usb ports are legacy" doesn't sound as bad, does it?

I have probably stayed in a dozen or more hotels that had in each room a docking station for iPod hooked into the room's stereo... All of which are completely useless since Apple switched away from the old large flat connector. Why would those big buyers be interested in Apple-compatibility next time around?

A pretty standard comment to apply to Apple goes like this:

Apple is all about fashion/marketing... [random selection of current justifications of this view, along with what the user wants from a product that nobody actually makes]

If you've ever seen one of these threads you must have come across this. My question is, what value does it add? Also, frankly, associating Apple with fashion is now an empty statement. Who honestly disagrees that they care about fashion?

The macbook pro was a workhorse. Well built, lots of connectivity and useful for whatever life threw at it. A little bulky, Not sleek and elegant. Macbook air (and new macbook) are the sleek light and beautiful models.

They're making the macbook pro more like the "air" and "macbook", pretty to look at but much less functional. People who like the OS are left with no where to get the machine they need and aren't happy.

While usb c is the future, its going to be a long time before the usb a port goes away.

The lack of ports usable without dongles significantly hurt functionality. sometimes its just the number of ports, for example: College intern with air bemoans the lack of ability to connect our fast wired internet and monitor at same time as one thunderbolt port. This kind of thing can't help but hurt your reputation. I use every port on my macbook rmbp except the sd card for bioinformatics job, (2 monitors [2 dongles], gig -ethernet[dongle], external drive, external keyboard and mouse). I could in theory get a dock, but its an unnecessary pain.

I think the claim of people with newer monitors is that the hub is built in. So no need for a separate dock, just plug your keyboard and mouse into your monitors (I do this on my Dells today) and then when you "dock" your laptop you now get power, Ethernet, display and peripherals all attached to the thing that's actually fixed in place (the displays).

Each of my Dell monitors has 2 or 3 USB ports (and today, I have to connect to them using a single USB to the laptop in addition to each display port connection). I think this new future won't be that bad, but it will require new displays.

For reference, this article received a substantial number of comments yesterday:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12877381

I thought HN auto-redirects you to the main post if you try to post a duplicate? I wonder why the dups keep happening. It's not detecting them?

Two different URLs:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-37880723

http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-37880723

Maybe the mods could also de-dupe some of these hostnames (like m.nytimes.com and nytimes.com).

Though now thanks to AMP, it might make more sense to de-dupe on known prefixes rather than Host particularly. Sadly, for the BBC at least that won't work, since the URLs look like they do /amp instead of their usual sections:

https://www.google.com/amp/www.bbc.co.uk/news/amp/36788782?c...

Maybe they can follow through and see how the URL resolves and compare the resulting URL as opposed to the posted URL. As it is, multiple URL shorteners can all direct to the same URL and all have different posts.

It auto redirects if the URL is identical. I think they will call it a dupe if it is the same content, different URL, or essentially the same story, even if it is a different write up.

/Not an HN mod and I do not play one on TV

I think HN used to have stronger dupe detection, but they realised that many good stories were not getting the discussion they deserved.

So now the dupe filter is weaker.

((Obviously I'm not a mod, but I'll try to find a post from dang or sctb explaining this))

EDIT: Here's one: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10223645

> We've adjusted the dupe detector to reject fewer URLs. If a story hasn't had significant attention in about the last year, reposts are ok. That's been the policy for a while, but we've brought the software closer to it. It will still reject reposts for a few hours, though, to avoid stampedes. Allowing reposts is a way of giving high-quality stories multiple chances at making the front page. Please do this tastefully and don't overdo it.

I think the dupe detector only ever identified identical URLs. (And you might notice some sites add some random junk at the end of the url to evade dupe filters on various sites).

Even with the same URL this doesn't work every time.

The LG 4K and 5K monitors that were announced at the same time as the new MBPs have also had a substantial (temporary) price cut.

I think it's the pricing on the machines themselves that really startled people, though.

They claim you cannot connect a new iPhone to a new MacBook Pro without a dongle. Even ignoring the fact that you probably don't have to, you can do this wirelessly. Is it really necessary to buy a dongle for your iPhone for anything realistic?

I didn't know you could charge over wireless! That's really cool!

You can't, but you can have iTunes backup your iPhone wirelessly.

Wow, downvotes for a reasonable question. I never need to connect my phone to my laptop. I've also spotted a pattern of the BBC saying dubiously truthful things recently in tech articles. Example from main evening news last week: "foreigners get better mobile reception in the U.K. than we do". So, no, they obviously don't. But they roam between providers (at cost), as has been the case for decades.

The phone comes with a charger.

It's not recent - their tech journalism has always been pretty poor. The BBC is a branch of the civil service culturally; anyone who understands science or tech but can't conjugate latin verbs stands no chance.

Why and how is it a "dilemma"? If anything, it should be called a "bad product decision" -- since they get rid of all of those ports.

Not only are these not dongles, most people have never seen a dongle.

It sounds like you're using a different definition of "dongle" than most people?

Dongle was originally a thing that you plugged into a computer that allowed it to execute expensive licensed software like PRO/Engineer or Softimage.

Huh, you make a good point. I'd forgotten about the days of USB dongles that do nothing but act as challenge-response devices for audio software DRM. Which makes me wonder, will all those now-legacy iLok USB-A DRM dongles still work with the USB-C to USB-A cables? Or will the iLok DRM detect the cables as a man-in-the-middle cracking attempt?

Nor does Youtube have any tubes.

Words change, but technical jargon changes faster than most.

dongle: "a small device that plugs into a computer and serves as an adapter or as a security measure to enable the use of certain software" http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/dongle

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