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Comment by whywhywhywhy | Hacker News Reader

I have same model at work and even ignoring the keyboard the thing has been awful to use. The two ports are a complete nightmare making you have to juggle between power/screen and reliable storage (Tried 5 dongles, none can hold a drive reliably under heavy use).

Kernel Panics on waking from sleep almost every day, bluetooth chip crashes and requires restarts to get working again.

Not to mention the disgustingly low storage in the base model that my company thinks is fine makes the thing almost unusable for any semblance of "Professional" work other than being a journalist.

The design doesn't even feel modern and the bezels are janky compared to whats normal now on the windows side. I understand the new model fixes some of this, but they still thought this thing was absolutely fine to ship for several years now speaks volumes to me.

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> Tried 5 dongles, none can hold a drive reliably under heavy use

This is something I've had a problem with as well on my late 2016 13" MBP, 2 usb-c port model. I have two external drives that I sync via rsync occasionally (1 local, 1 offsite). No matter what type of dongle I use, one of the disks always ejects shortly after beginning the rsync. Even with the Apple dongle, when I plug in one of the external disks via usb-a, and plug my usb-c power to the dongle, then plug in the 2nd external disk directly to the only other usb-c on the mac, it fails every time.

What I have been doing instead is unplugging the power cord and syncing the disks while running on battery. This seems to work, but the odd thing here is that about 50% of the time when I do this I lose my wifi connection as soon as I begin the rsync from disk to disk. Nothing I can do makes the network work again until after I unmount the external disks.

Having only two ports on the computer, one of which is also used for power, has turned out to be far more annoying than I imagined.

I don't understand why Apple doesn't give more ports. They removed the headphone jack in their phones, everyone else copied them (Samsung after making fun of it for a while). Apple makes repairing their machines hard by soldiering everything, others follow.

I hope other manufacturers don't start removing ports just because Apple does. Really annoying - why not just copy the good stuff from Apple, instead of their arrogant choices...

They already are. My father in law's Microsoft Surface has one fucking USB port.

I have the same and it’s making me want to move to a Linux laptop.

With the bluetooth chip, do you get an error when it crashes? Airdrop basically never works on mine and I was wondering if it might be a related problem.

Nope it's completely silent failure, only thing noticeable is I think if I toggle it on and off in the menu a few times it will freeze coming back on. But rebooting fixes it.

But yeah AirDrop wont work in the state so it's likely the same issue because on a long enough uptime the chip crashes without fail.

Don't know if you're aware, but if you click the bluetooth icon in the menu bar with Shift and Option held down, you get a debug menu that lets you reset the bluetooth module - might save you rebooting.

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