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Comment by augstein | Hacker News Reader

If you really want or need MagSafe, as I do, you can have it with USB-C only Macs too.

There are many magnetic adapters you can buy, the good ones working better than the original MagSafe 2, which easily fell off when using MacBooks on your Lap, due to the connector being T shaped (instead of MagSafe 1 being L shaped, which worked great).

I also hope they don‘t bring back SD card readers and big clunky HDMI ports into the MacBook lineup, potentially reducing the amount of USB-C ports and making some models thicker.

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I hope they don't bring back USB-A, but the SD card slot and hdmi have been sorely missed. If you do anything with photography, being able to just plug the card directly into your laptop makes a world of difference. Same thing with walking into any meeting and already knowing you'll be able to plug into a projector if needed, without having to run out and grab a dongle.

Others never use SD and have a USB-C to A dongle permanently plugged in (me). The ideal exact connectors probably differ a lot per person, and at least USB-C+Thunderbolt can support everything.

HDMI is probably the least controversial, although there will also be people who never connect external displays.

> The ideal exact connectors probably differ a lot per person

Agreed. All I really need is more USB-C ports. Both my current MacBook Air and my upcoming MacBook Pro have only two USB-C ports and I don’t understand why they didn’t make them with four USB-C ports.

Its limited by CPU PCI connectors, adding more ports needs a lot more bandwidth, uses more power and needs more pins. The low end models are not expected to have these, but the larger more power hungry ones will.

>The ideal exact connectors probably differ a lot per person

While I'd probably prefer more ports, there's certainly an argument to keep things simple with USB-C and let most people buy their adapter of choice.

With respect to HDMI, it's very common in offices and for people speaking at events, but most consumers wouldn't use it much.

> With respect to HDMI, it's very common in offices and for people speaking at events, but most consumers wouldn't use it much.

Completely false. Most cheaper CONSUMER monitors today come with only two inputs: HDMI and VGA. More expensive ones come with Displayport in addition. All TVs have HDMI ports. What else, aside from monitors and TVs, are consumers connecting their laptops to??

Agreed. It probably should have occurred to me before, but a lot of the Wacom and Huion drawing tablets with screens use HDMI for display and some kind of USB for input. Obviously that would be better if they were upgraded to thunderbolt models that could do both, but that would of course require another $1000+ upgrade for those users on top of the laptop.

Of course the real question is how much more quickly does thunderbolt get adopted when nobody's Macbooks have HDMI, which is probably one that Apple is asking themselves. They've never shied away from pushing industries forward to accommodate them.

I have noticed that it seems like more windows users at work are also using thunderbolt for displays on small and light laptops

If you do anything with photography, you are carrying around a camera, batteries, and lenses anyway. Just buy a 12$ card reader and put it into your camera bag with all your other expensive stuff.

It surprises me that people who buy high-dollar computers are so reluctant to buy an extra cable. TB3 natively supports DP at faster speeds than HDMI 2.0b can push. You can buy a TB3 to DP1.4 cable online for $15. Even the most expensive cable for this purpose sold on Apple's web store costs $50. I suppose you can ask your office manager to buy a couple for the meeting rooms, in order to accommodate Mac users.

Maybe consider that it’s more nuanced in real life.

That $12 card reader, even expensive USB-3 card readers, are often a lot slower than that builtin one. They get lost and broken, not even considering that when you’re on the go, many photographers will absolutely try to shed as much unnecessary weight as possible, as not many people are built like the hulk or have an entourage of assistants doing the heavy lifting.

I use my laptop a lot outside of an office, and having that multitude of builtin ports is an absolute must, as dongles are quite difficult to deal with in situations when I don’t have a flat surface to put the laptop on. That TB/Ethernet dongle I regularly do have to use has been a great source of frustration.

I bought a new MacBook Air last year, and a USB A/C adapter with it. I somehow lost the adapter. Bought another one. Then bought a dual A/C USB thumb drive. I'm getting along, but would appreciate at least one USB-A port.

I am also a photographer, and miss the SD port. But I realize that's kinda niche, and can understand it going away. I wouldn't be surprised to see cameras move away from SD cards eventually anyway.

The speed of the SD is far more limiting than the speed of the card reader itself, even for USB2.0.

As for whether I consider the nuances of "real life," I traveled by land across several countries with a DSLR, and took hundreds of photos a week. My DSLR has a CF slot and an SD slot; I used the SD slot for a wifi chip, and saved all photos to CF. My CF reader hasn't gotten lost or broken, and I didn't have "an entourage of assistants doing the heavy lifting" (whatever that means when talking about a card reader).

In real life, you can just use an external card reader. It's not a big limitation, just like it's not a big limitation that laptops these days don't have optical drives.

USB 2.0 tops out at a theoretical 60MB/s, and in reality it is much slower, far below the read speeds of fast SD cards.

I appreciate that it’s good enough under some circumstances, but not always. Certainly not when taking several cards worth of photos a day, with only very limited time to do transfer, selection, and editing.

It's not about the cost, it's about UX. If I just did a full day of shooting photos, and I am in the hotel room looking at the photos, I don't want to dig through my bag and pull out the card reader, or to have a dongle hanging off of my laptop when I'm doing it. If I can just get the card out of the camera and throw it in the laptop it's so much nicer

Every single peripheral I own is USB-A. I've never seen USB-C-only as the default option on any peripheral in a store or Amazon. Not having USB-A on a laptop is just absurd to me.

I agree that it is the standard, but I wish it wasn't. USB-C is preferable in every way.

When the iMac came out, everyone thought it was crazy not to have a serial port on the outside, since that was the standard for mouse and keyboard. But pretty soon, everything was available for USB. In fact, you might not have all those USB-A peripherals if Apple hadn't cut the cord, so to speak.

So I don't mind the loss of USB-A as much because USB-C is a strict upgrade. But for the SD card reader and the HDMI those are sort of separate and common use cases.

Of the MANY different ones I have tried (both 24-pin tb3 and 20-pin usb-c) NONE of the magnetic adapters work the same as a regular connection. When they are plugged in and you close the lid (macbook pro m1), they keep the display active. When using a "proper" cable, the display sleeps.

If anyone has found one that works properly, please let me know where I can get one!

Edit: Not sure why I am getting downvotes for this... Care to enlighten me?

It's important to note these adapters go against the USB C spec.

Most consumers miss being able to simply connect their laptop to their tv with an HDMI cable, but they know they have no voice in this modern day enlightened absolutism.

There's are plenty of USB-C to HDMI cables and TVs also come with USB-C I outs these days. We're in a weird transition phase, but going back to multiple different ports would be silly.

transition phase that has lasted around what, 4 years already?

You can forget about TVs coming out without HDMI ports. There is currently no plan to have TVs with USB-C inputs only. So it is up to laptops to adapt, or more likely, that people need to carry adapters.

Also maybe gamer TVs or more expensive models have USB-C inputs, I certainly have never seen one. Even in the monitor space, USB-C is seen as a premium feature. Even 5 years after the first laptops with USB-C.

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