Exactly the chain of adapters that beat was complaining of.
And I'm not an outlier case. There are a lot of audio professionals and semi-pros that depend on old Firewire interfaces. These were Apple's market for selling high-end laptops! This is basically just disregard for your oldest and frankly most profitable customers. If I didn't feel like a new MBP would actually be sacrificing functionality, I'd probably have upgraded already. Instead, I'm considering a platform switch. That's bad.
btw, as someone who didn't use firewire, i hated that port. waste of space, could have used an extra usb port instead. and it wasn't like there was a lot of gear that used it, unlike e.g. ethernet or vga which sometimes came in handy (i also loath vga).
USB2 was more competitive, but Firewire stuck around due to its lower latency for audio applications.
And actually you aren't Apple's most profitable customer since you are still clamouring for old technologies. It's early adopters that upgrade every year that are the most valuable to Apple.
If it were up to the luddites and their obsession with compatibility, a laptop would have a dvd drive, firewire, usb-a, usb-c, thunderbolt, hdmi, dvi, vga, sd, microsd,vga, and display port all in one laptop chassis.
Having one single port, that can do all those things and do them just as well, is a far preferable alternative. Couple that with the future transition to wireless-only technology, and we're on our way to the future.
Personally I dont use anything wireless apart from WiFi, and even then only on my laptop
(Well traces anyway, but you know what I mean.)
Any recording interface more substantial than a headphone jack is wired. It's going to remain that way for a while. Audio is a quasi-realtime problem with a lot of bandwidth. Neither Bluetooth nor 802.11 are really reliable enough for the task, and won't be for some time to come.
Preserving investment in hardware that works, rather than making a risky expenditure on hardware that may or many not work (and will change process), isn't "Luddite". It's realist. We have the same problem with much more static tech, like ATMs and voting machines. The "one single port" dream you're spouting? I've heard that dream before. It was called "Firewire" back then. Another decade or so, and we'll be digging Lightning connectors out of our junk drawer and saying "Hey, remember this? Do we even need to keep this anymore?"
But this is where I get pragmatic. I know I have compatibility issues, so I'm looking at semi-retiring the MBP just for the heavy lifting and compatibility of audio, and maybe looking at what else can be done about photo editing. And a Chromebook for web browsing and other not-hard-work sounds better and better all the time.
It's all part of change. It's inconvenient(change) when done well, and absolutely show-stopping when done poorly. Apple took a ham-fisted approach to this, and decided you should go through that right now. Not a lot of choice left to people like you(those with significant hardware investments) beyond using refurb gear, or spending a large sum on a brand new set of hardware and accessories(which will go through this same cycle again in the future).
It kind of all stinks, but there isn't a terrible lot us little people can do about it.
What is that interface? And it's not supported through the USB-C interface?
It's like if we had no common way of measuring things. Imagine having to walk around with like 10 different tape measures because there was no standard. It's stupid. All of these different port interfaces are just like that.
They're still putting that crap* in interfaces!
*Note, I say "crap" only because I'm not cool enough to have any ADAT interfaces.
Your view is short-sighted. You're saying "What about me? What about right now?".
Suppose I bite the bullet and switch to Windows? Apple's lost me then. They're not going to win me back. And that's not just the Mac. That's maybe my next phone. My next pad. My next router (oh wait, they're getting out of the wireless router game too).
Losing customers who have been with them for decades, who have spent thousands and thousands of dollars on their products and will stop? That fucking well matters.
As for losing customers, well, then we will look at the sales numbers.
I wasn't "happy" with the new MacBook Pro lineup, but I personally love the direction they're going. The only bad thing is the price increase, but they will drop the price.
But for your "I'm a customer I matter" comment. No you don't. Apple isn't going to let people who want a gigantic laptop with a million different ports get in the way of a wireless or standardized port world. I hate the fact that my work monitors have all these connections. You have all these cords coming out, different port types that do the same thing, and how many times has somebody gone to a meeting only to have to bring some dongle or find out that they have hdmi and the conference room is vga only or something? All of that is stupid. It's 2016. We can do better. I don't want to be tethered to the wall or a some device like a slave.
Out of pure curiosity, when's the last time Apple lowered the price of an existing product?
Wasn't that my original argument?
http://blog.fosketts.net/2016/10/29/total-nightmare-usb-c-th...
That way I'd have a chance to actually pick up any USBC devices whatsoever before moving to a laptop that can only connect to USBC without dongles. 'Cuz right now I have zero, and so does my Mac-only office. Even the couple of USBC Android testing phones floating around come with a to-A USB cable, so I'd have to buy a new cable for them.
This time round Apple has replaced every port with a USB-C port, which means I don't need to transition only 1 interface. I need to transition all.
And the most painful part about this move is they are doing it to the product line that in the past was loved because it came with USB + FW400 + FW800 + Video + Magsafe. IOW, a design goal for the Pro line used to be easy compatibility so professionals could end up in any situation and have a great chance of getting their computers to work with their environment without any adapters.
What? That's not even close to true. The iMac replaced all of Apple's then-standard ports with USB. ADB: gone. Serial: gone. SCSI: gone.
More or less back on topic ... I bought a HP Probook for my on-the-road studies/work last cycle because I needed a portable that I could do _work_ with and repairability, matte screen, mouse buttons, VGA, HDMI, and whole lot of other things were much more important to me than width or mass or shiny. It came with Windows and it's well supported.
I would like to get another 17" macbook pro someday (mine is pretty old and 80% retired), and this move and the messaging around it suggests that Apple doesn't care to make one. It's no surprise, but it still stings a bit, and as noted else where it is breathtakingly clumsy for their remaining mac business (as is that press conference).
I'm not opposed on principle to a Macbook with a touchbar but I'm not buying, why? Because it has plus or minus the same specs as my current model which also connects to my monitors and everything else I use. Why would I impose that cost and pain on myself? Just to have the latest and greatest for the sake of it? Screw that, I'd rather be a luddite than a lemming.
It works well. I just miss a 4rt USB port.
Wires are great, honestly. Easy to debug and use. The original zero config.
This is what we're moving to. It sucks that people can't see that.
So this wireless dream future? It's just a dream, for those who have more demanding needs than surfing the web.
I lived in a house with several roomates for a year or so, and I never ever had a problem with the internet because I used an ethernet cable. My roomates went through 3 wireless routers and a wireless repeater and they were never able to completely solve the myriad of issues that comes with wireless technology on a congested spectrum.
It really boggles my mind that they'd allow themselves to be frustrated, waste many combined hours of their life troubleshooting, and spend hundreds of dollars on network hardware when the solution is SO SIMPLE and dates back to 1970s.
Wireless technology needs to get a whole lot more reliable to get its foot in my door.
USB-C was a great idea taken one step too far. USB-C would be perfect if it hadn't been saddled with the requirement to handle 100 Watts of power. That's an overkill requirement for a feature that wasn't demanded by anyone aside from OEMs looking to cut an additional charging port off the bill of materials.