The orange dot will appear on the live output, which is fed to an LED video wall/projector/etc. on or near a stage. Completely unacceptable, and makes Macs entirely useless for live visuals.
Mic input is very useful for receiving timecode to keep production gear in sync.
But.... why? Why would a little orange dot offend anyone?
Monitor outputs are for monitors - if you want an application-specific video output you can get that and it won't be a desktop so it won't have this problem.
If you mirror your desktop then yeah... you get whatever desktop UI chrome is on your desktop.
That's just how this stuff works. Sure, you could use something like a DeckLink, but the vast majority of things like this just use a monitor output.
You're not going to "gotcha!" people who have actually done this stuff.
For the use cases like the one described in the article, that distinction matters. I'm not questioning the usefulness of the orange dot, but rather the people saying the workflow of using a second monitor as output as being invalid and wrong.
TRUE: the dot BEING THERE is useless (and undesireable and bad)
FALSE: the dot makes Macs useless for live visuals
Just because something is 100% bad design, bothersome, 100% negative, and should never have been allowed to happen, does NOT mean it destroys a product entirely.
When Mini Coopers were made with the stupidest turn signals ever (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28661282) that doesn't make the car undrivable even though there's ABSOLUTELY no defense of the design.
Just because other people are feeling super aggravated about this completely stupid design decision by Apple doesn't mean it's valid to project that on me as if I'm fighting some battle.
I don't really care about this. I get it, people are upset about a totally indefensible, short-sighted design that impacts people's ability to use Macs to do presentations that will be accepted in professional contexts.
Yes, there's some sense to the hyperbole that says something is "useless" when reality is "this will not be accepted in my field of work". It's still hyperbole. Admitting that it's hyperbole doesn't mean accepting the bad design.
This is like when you crash a car. Insurance company considers it "totalled". But you can still drive it. The cost of fixing the car is more than the value of the car.
In this case, the negative effect of the orange dot outweighs all utility of the product for the use case. So it's useless in the sense that it's "worse than nothing" by some metric. It's useless in the same way that a shopping cart is useless for commuting to work. I mean, TECHNICALLY, you could commute to work in a shopping cart. But it would be worse than just not using it.
The orange dot doesn't total the presentation the way a totalled-car in a crash does, certainly not necessarily. It's NOT worse than nothing. It's not like a shopping cart for commuting to work.
The point of the replies here overall is that those things are hyperbole. It's NOT about nit-picking the language. It's "well, technically, the car will still drive in this case", it's saying that the orange dot DOES NOT ruin presentations that badly. You can ACTUALLY and PRACTICALLY present with the orange dot.
A better analogy: your nice car gets a rock through a window with a noticeable hole and huge cosmetic crack. You say "I can't drive this now! My car is useless! It's totalled!" And people are like "Dude, it's not totalled." And you say, "This is my professional car for business, I can't show up with a cracked window!" and People are like, "well, you could actually…"
It's not like the software has a bug that inverts all the colors, and people are saying "you could in fact do an inverted-color presentation, it's possible". It's JUST a little dot, and it's bad, but it's NOT as bad as the hyperbole.
I'll take you at your word that it's not that bad for you. I'll take someone else at their word that it is that bad for them. It probably depends a lot on the context.
The orange dot being unacceptable to some people and situations is never something I've doubted in the slightest.
Some people can't seem to grasp that it's perfectly consistent to say "you're being hyperbolic, but your objection is fully sound". It's as though after a crash that results in a shattered window, someone says "it's totalled!" and then if someone else says "it's NOT totalled" they take that to mean that a shattered window is no real problem.
The orange dot is totally stupid, unacceptable in many situations, the decision was atrocious, AND the language people have been using about it is hyperbolic.