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Comment by corey_moncure | Hacker News Reader

It's astonishing how far the MBP has fallen in ten years. My 2010 MBP was and still is the perfect laptop design. Look what Apple has taken away from us: MagSafe, SD card slot, optical audio I/O, RJ45, USB-A, even the top row of our keyboards. What have we gained? The same internal advances that are in every other computer, a gimmicky touch bar, fragile keyboard mechanism, and USB-C.

What's really sad is that none of this decline was necessary. All they had to do was leave the perfect laptop alone, and go on upgrading the internals. Were they selling the 2010-2012 MBPs at a loss or something?

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Except you aren't even getting the internal advances. They are seriously selling an 8th gen i5 with 8 GiB of DDR3 memory in the base models.

MagSafe was flawed - I’m glad it’s gone. It had massive reliability issues due to dust getting in between the connectors - which ending up causing charging problems, excessive heat at the charging port and countless charging adapter replacements.

On MBP2015 and i love magsafe.

It's saved me a fortune.

I was in my photography class and my magsafe cable was tripped about four times in one day. Crazy.

Mostly because they insist on using supposedly eco-friendly rubber that frays dangerously.

Ignoring that me buying 5 chargers across the life of a device is far worse for the environment than just 1.

My Titanium Powerbook charger still remains un-frayed and I used that laptop everyday for 9 years.

I’m on a 2012 MBP and MagSafe has worked flawlessly for 8 years for me. I think I might hold on to my MBP until it doesn’t boot up anymore, there’s no upside to “upgrading” right now, besides being able to double the ram. MagSafe, 2012 keyboard destroys 2020’s, no Touch Bar, and most importantly- it’s rock-solid reliable.

I had the very last edition magsafe connector on my 2015ish macbook. And _that_ one had the infuriating problem that the charge port got so hot that it would melt the insulation right off of the wire! I replaced the charger every few months, and it just kept happening.

I upgraded to a thinkpad.

On a 2013 Macbook air, MagSafe has worked perfectly for me for the last 7 years. Saved my laptop a couple of times too. Way more worth it than AppleCare.

To be fair, they fixed the keyboard mechanism. But agree 100% on all other points.

Could have been fixed much quicker, I don't see why we are saying they did a good job on that problem when they just replaced it in exactly the normal product cycle.

Could have been fixed within a year but it would have cost more money so nah just ship a faulty product for 4 years they'll eat it up anyway and replace it when we were gonna do a redesign anyway.

Seriously are you missing optical?

I can count on one hand the number of times I've had to use an optical drive in the past 5 years. I'm guessing most of us are in a similar situation. For those instances, I pull out an old external USB blu-ray player.

Optical audio I/O. Many people might not know this, but you could actually plug in an optical S/PDIF cable into your Macbook Pro, on both the "microphone" input and "headphones" output line, to get digital audio in and out.

I had that on an 09 Pro/Unibody. It was kinda brilliant (ha). Imagine such dual type port on a phone...

The top level commenter was not talking about an optical drive like CDs or DVDs, they were talking about having optical audio connectivity through a TOSLINK mini plug.

Ah. I used to plug my old original Core 2 Duo MBP into a 5.1 system using a mini TOSlink cable, but since HDMI started doing surround audio I haven't had a need for optical audio connections. It was cool seeing a LED inside the audio jack, however.

What's the alternative? Laser beams and fibre optics are still potentially better than conductive wire. I suspect we will see a resurgence.

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