Apple wanted to be "bold" and forced a lot of their users into a pipeline that didn't last. And now they are listening to the demands of their users and backtracking.
Users that stuck with them are now being punished for their brand loyalty.
Apple: "If you want to connect to HDMI, you have to buy a dongle now. Also TOUCHBAR! Woot."
User: "Ugh...fine"
Apple: "So... now that you own that dongle that you didn't need, but we decided to make you need. Well, we decided not to make you need it anymore! It's built in. Also, no more touchbar! See! We listen!"
User: "Ugh......."
I'm not here to harp on Apple, but I understand why some people are a little put off by their decisions.
Hell, you can now buy monitors that work only with USB-C. It’s clearly the way everything is going, Apple just moved a bit too fast.
- 4x Thunderbolt 4 (1x with power supply) - 3x USB-A 3.2 - 1x USB-A 2.0 (with power supply) - 1x Gigabit Ethernet - 1x UHS-II SDXC - 1x Audio
Actually, it looks like this same hub is sold by both Sonnettech and Kensington.
https://www.sonnettech.com/product/echo11-thunderbolt4-dock/...
https://www.kensington.com/p/products/device-docking-connect...
That you have to drag with you if you want those ports away from your desk. Plug into a TV or projector and you need a dongle. No thanks. Ports are fine by me and I don't care if that adds 0.5mm or some stupid aesthetics nonsense.
For SD cards, the majority of people don’t use SD cards (even customers for the pro line). It’s a concession to an important niche, but forcing that niche to have a USBC adapter that is built into the SD card (maybe not possible?), having a separate SD card reader dongle, or having the camera itself be the SD card reader all seem like better choices than forcing all laptops to have an SD reader.
What’s the compelling story for why SD card or HDMI strictly need to be built in for all customers? The story for HDMI is kind of the strongest because the HDMI market is much more common day-to-day and USB-C as a display technology hasn’t yet permeated standalone TVs and projectors.
I'm a photographer, so the SD card slot is nice for me personally, but it really doesn't make sense to build it into the laptop. It must be used by a tiny percentage of people.
As it stands, I still have an analog audio out because I've procrastinated on getting a usb digital in/out, and I also have a ethernet <-> thunderbolt connector because I only got about 400Mb/s when going via the monitor instead of 950+ when going direct.
3 small connectors all on 1 side isn't that bad.
That being said, I welcome the HDMI addition mostly for older conference rooms which aren't equipped with Apple TV / Webex Proximity / etc.
Just the other day, I had to buy an HDMI cable for my screen. That could be a USB-C. But screen makers and graphic card makers are not going to change overnight. No one is strong enough to push the standard too. If anyone can do it, it's Apple. This is, in my opinion, a step backward.
If every cable looks the same but one is suited for 240W of juice but doesn’t do data and the other vice versa, maybe we would be worse off…
Oh yeah, and also, unrelated to the above, I now inspect the tiny grey-on-black voltage information whenever I'm about to plug in a USB-C cable for providing power.
Oh yeah, and also, each USB-C cable has its own special purpose, since they aren't actually interchangeable, as it turns out.
USB-C somehow managed to find the worst intersection of "Universally pluggable" without being a universal standard.
Someone needs to be the pedant and say this every time it comes up: It wasn't the Nintendo device that didn't respect the spec, it was knock-off docks and chargers that didn't respect the spec and damaged the Nintendo device [0]. I happen to think that Nintendo's engineers should have designed against some shenanigans by third parties (I do with my USB-C devices), but they weren't strictly wrong.
[0] https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2019/08/heres-why-nintendo-sw...
https://www.macrumors.com/2021/10/19/16-inch-macbook-pro-fas...
USB-C seems to be fine perfectly straight on with no strain at all but use it in anything less than ideal situations and it wears out surprisingly fast. The connectors tend to be longer than they are wide, which is always bad for robustness and they have 0 built in strain relief.
I think it performs well and they got the reversible design right but its just a little too wimply for the way people really use their devices.
Obviously YMMV but when you manage a device fleet you start to see more clearly how "average users" treat things and how designs hold up.
How is anyone being punished ?
As for sticking with them - macbooks have to be the most recognized laptop brand out there
The new Macbook Pro doesn’t affect your current macbook’s operation
Your dialogue creates a straw-user out there that somehow adopts Apple design decisions as dogma - it’s just a machine
The pitch in the event was basically "we're giving pros what they want".
> Evans Hankey, vice president of Industrial Design, and Alan Dye, vice president of Human Interface Design, will report to Jeff Williams, Apple’s chief operating officer
(From Apple’s website about Jony Ive).
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RgBDdDdSqNE
I really like this MacBook Pro but at $2000 I may wait for the next Air. I really don't need the Pro features, HDMI, SD card, that many GPUs, ..., and my 2017 Air is just fine for now.
If you think this is bad, you should have been around after Jobs left in the 90's and the icky product line after Mac IIfx. No one liked the PowerMacs and PCs were so incredibly cheap that only art departments had macs.
But even when Jobs returned, remember when everyone lost their shit when Jobs removed the disk drive from the iMac?
Maybe the iPhone 3 was the last universally rejoiced Apple product.
(But that notch tho. It really tweaks my obsessive nature. I'm still on an iPhone 6 so I haven't encountered the notch anywhere yet.)
I can't really find any criticism of the machines themselves. Negative comments are directed at Apple for pre-existing customer-hostile behavior like their repair policies.
I explain such behavior to myself by keeping in mind that the internet is many people with many opinions. If one sees an inconsistent response to a topic, one is likely seeing disjoint groups of people that separately have consistent opinions, rather than a cohesive group that can't make up its mind. I find it easy to miss that when I'm not paying attention to who said what.
Apple stopped including USB power bricks because everyone on the planet is drowning in them by now, and there are many choices like multi-port AC adapters, ones with different combinations of USB A and C meaning you probably want to pick the adapter you want anyway. But people screamed blue-bloody-murder. And then not long after Apple does it, Samsung quietly follows suit and nobody says a fucking word.
Apple dropped floppy drives and the world screamed about how stupid they were. At the time software had long since stopped coming on floppy, USB thumb drives were out, ethernet was everywhere and wifi was going mainstream. Apple helped put the nail in the coffin, pushing many people to USB thumb drives, network file shares, wifi, etc.
Apple dropped optical drives, same thing. Software was coming digitally; I worked for a company that offered a digital download in 1999 and we were a dinky little niche company. By the time Apple stopped including optical drives on their laptops, CDs were largely dead for software, everyone was using MP3s, etc. That room freed up space for stuff like bigger batteries.
Apple pushed hard on digital display interconnects when much of the PC world was still chugging along on VGA which worked poorly with actual raster displays that were rapidly becoming the norm and PC hardware companies just couldn't seem to figure out how the fuck to communicate "here are the resolutions and refresh rates I can do", something Macs had been doing for a decade. Kids these days don't remember the pains of having to do geometric adjustments on a digital display for a supposedly raster signal.
Dropping headphone connectors on their phones, people screamed blue bloody murder. A pair of pretty decent wireless headphones with 8 hours of battery life were not hard to find for $30ish, now they're commonplace for cheaper, and damn near every car comes with a bluetooth audio function in its stereo, even work vans. And if you want hardwired headphones, a dongle is a $5-20 affair, with Apple's audio adapter scoring very good marks in audio DAC tests...