Hacker News Reader

Comment by krzyk | Hacker News Reader

Bummer, I hooe usbc can still be used for charging. Abd that will be the default charger. I love the fact that I can charge my phone laptoo (lenovo) and my wifes macbook air all with the same charger.

Bummer 2, because now producers of tvs/monitors will have less drive to reolace old hdmi with usbc.

sd cards? Are they that popular nowadays?

View on HN

You can still charge with the USB-C ports. The supplied power adapter is a USB-C charger with a detachable USB-C to Magsafe cord.

So it's now going to be possible to use magsafe for non Apple device but that are using USB-C charging?

No. Magsafe is a different port. The magsafe cable is magsafe on one end, usb-c on the other. The magsafe end being the bit that pushes power out.

It's a USB-C brick with a USB-C to MagSafe cable. You can remove the magsafe part and use it with a C-C charger

I wonder if you can still use the old magsafe power cords to charge the new machines, even if at a lower wattage. Those charger cables aren't cheap, and I still have a few from old MBPs.

You can keep using them with a Magsafe-to-USB-C adapter, for example from Elecjet [1]. I have a couple of those and they have worked just fine with my 2017 MBP.

[1]: https://elecjet.com/products/anywatt-magsafe

I'm guessing its not physically compatible, since they made a point of calling it MagSafe 3. But we won't know until a machine lands in the wild.

It is shaped differently and they said it was updated to support more current.

I highly doubt it, MagSafe 1 to 2 looks similar but are different physical dimensions. MagSafe 3 looks to be the same, the port looks significantly skinnier/shorter than 2 (about the same as the usb-c ports).

And the MagSafe cord retails for $50.

For a power cable.

Ya, for connecting to a hub it's awesome, just plug one cable in and you get power, monitor, keyboard and mouse. Hope that still works.

Also, I like being able to charge on either side, it's annoying having the cable across when the plug is on the wrong side.

So if the Thunderbolt 4 ports support all this, then it's amazing, just best of all worlds. Otherwise a bit of a bummer.

Thunderbolt4, while more expensive, supports all of this and with a clearly marked cable. Usb-c is a mess. It’s worth the extra $20 to have a cable that can do usb-c and thunderbolt.

USB-C are more like adapters that let you plug in anything that isn't USB-C. There still does not exist a device for under 100 USD that will let you plug in the MBP's USB-C power, a USB-C (over thunderbolt 3) monitor, and also a USB-C to Lightning cable. I hope you didn't have a wired keyboard, too.

There does exist a hub that has 2 USB-As and 2 USB-Cs for 50 USD, but it does not pass through video or power.

My guess is this change was brought about by all the poor quality USB-C cables, hubs, and chargers out there. I bricked my Macbook Pro M1 by trying to power it from a supposedly compatible hub but wasn't negotiating the power output properly. Had to send it in for repair and have heard many other similar reports... guessing they decided to bring back the Magsafe for fast charging to avoid this headache of cheap/improperly manufactured USB-C hardware.

The place I worked when the USB-C MacBooks came out had a hell of a time with video output. This monitor only works with a DisplayPort dongle, this one won't work with a new MacBook at all, this one works but only if you use one specific cable, this one works but glitches in ways it never did with HDMI, et c. There came to be a whole level of cult knowledge about which laptop + cable + monitor combos would work and which wouldn't.

It was a very dumb situation. If they really wanted to go to USB-C they should have had a transition period where they just replaced the thunderbolt and maybe the charging ports, until shit settled down—which it never really did, because the USB-C cable situation is insane, so here we are, with some ports added back.

It's 2021, almost 2022, and I still wish one of the ports they'd put back was USB-A. I'll probably feel the same way in 2025. Maybe by 2030, when almost none of these MBPs are still in use, I won't still need a USB-A port way more than I need a USB-C port.

I think that many people only decided that they didn't need these features because Apple removed them.

It reminds me of this video from awhile ago by The Onion:

Apple Introduces Revolutionary New Laptop With No Keyboard[1]

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9BnLbv6QYcA

Oh man, that's one of my favorite Onion videos. So many clever subtleties that make it a UX nightmare. Like how the first suggestion when you select T is the unicode TM symbol, the absurd sentence predictions that come up first when you type "the a", scrolling through an alphabetical list of every file on your hard drive.

I also imagine they were making a joke with the $2600 starting price, which is funny cause that's what I paid (albeit in Canadian dollars) for my base-model 14" MBP yesterday

They kept two USB-A ports on the 2020 M1 Mac mini. I’m grateful for that, but having them provided by a dock is fine for me.

It’s possible they’ll show up in upcoming machines like the iMac Pro and Mac Pro.

These new computers can also be charged over USB-C.

This is moot now right? Because even though magsafe point is back, they are still shiping with USBC charger by default.

And you can still plug a sketchy USB-C charger into one of the 3 ports.

The announcement implies that they no longer attempt fast charging over USB-C, so lower power requirement will improve reliability with 3rd party hardware.

What? Where does it imply that?

> My guess is this change was brought about by all the poor quality USB-C cables, hubs, and chargers out there.

I doubt it, you can still plug the usb-c >> magsafe3 cable into a crappy hub.

It’s almost assuredly to bring back the “my idiot pet or rambunctious child just ran through my power cord” breakaway support.

> I hope usbc can still be used for charging

They said it can.

SD cards are still widely used in professional cameras, and they're not going away anytime soon.

Yeah, I have one, but I use it so rarely since I had Pixel 4.

I was also looking at wifi enabled sdcards, because I'm lazy and would like to get images sync themselves.

I thought pros use wifi sd cards already.

Wi-Fi SD cards are kinda cool, but I don't know any pro that uses them. The write speeds tend to be slow, which is noticeable even for still photography nevermind if you're recording 4k video on a prosumour drone or camera. Secondly, they're inside a device and have the antenna built in, so as well as draining battery it's slow to transfer files off. If you're shooting 3mb jpegs then it might be OK, but my 6 year old DSLR is producing 30mb files per exposure.

You can still use the thunderbolt/USBC ports (not sure if all three or just one) for charging. But I think only the new MagSafe 3 port gives you fast charge (50% battery life in 30 minutes).

> sd cards? Are they that popular nowadays?

For photographers, absolutely.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com