What I do mind is that there's only 3 of them.
The problem with the 2 USB-C ports on modern PC laptops is that one of them pretty much has to be reserved for the charger, whereas the MBP has a MagSafe port that you can charge with instead. So it really only feels like you have one USB-C port and the other ports are just there as a consolation. That might work out to roughly equal, but I don't think it leaves the Mac off worse. I don't hate the dongles so much though.
It wouldn't have hurt to have some USB-A and HDMI on the MBP--the Minis can pull it off, so clearly the hardware is capable--but more (Thunderbolt) USB-C would still be the best option IMO. USB-A (definitely) and HDMI (probably) will eventually be relics someday, even if they are here for a little while longer.
I'm sure it's handy for mobile devices where size and versatility trumps everything, but on laptop/desktop machines where longer-term usage is expected I would prefer something more reliable.
C is absolutely better than the micro/mini variants, but not the full-size ports.
I'm just salty because I will have to replace either the ports on my Macbook or my USB-C wireless headphone receiver (both are a pricey endeavor, not to mention the downtime of having the laptop shipped for repair) just for the same issue to most likely reoccur a year down the line since it wasn't a result of any kind of misuse (both devices are exclusively used in an office environment and otherwise in brand new condition).
Which is like, a great way to subsidize junk USB hubs...? But for sure they love following through with policies.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Attachment_Unit_Interfac...
ADB was definitely proprietary, but arguably it wasn't a data port, nobody used ADB to output data.
Apple SCSI ports used nonstandard Apple connectors.
Apple Ethernet port was just Ethernet, except Macs preferred AppleTalk for networking, which was a purported competitor to Ethernet.
Apple USB port was just USB, except they were among the firsts, so it was kind of ex-proprietary.
Apple FireWire was just IEEE1394, except(combine Ethernet and USB)
Apple Thunderbolt was(combine all above)
Apple USB-C is(combine all above)
The bizarre part of the USB-C story is not Apple's involvement or early adoption of it, but rather that the mobile hardware side of Apple refused to support it. That they clung to the Lightning connector until the EU forced them to drop it, while their computer division had long since and enthusiastically adopted USB-C, is much more damning.
Your argument was they had a rule of "one standard and two proprietary ports" as a means to "allow data to be ingested easily and freely shared inside Apple ecosystem, but not exported back out to the outside world with same ease".
For serial they used mini-DIN to save space on the back of the machine instead of a random mix of DB-25 and DE-9 on the PC side. My family and everyone I knew used a dime-a-dozen cable to use a typical PC modem, data was shared feely. There was no "one standard" port at this time to get data "ingested", serial went both ways.
Even on PCs, to do anything serial you needed hardware and driver support anyway, that was the blocker, not the shape of the port. If Apple adopted DB-26 for serial, how would that let data share more freely?
For SCSI, the DB-25 Apple used was not proprietary. And even in the System 6 days they had Apple File Exchange to access FAT-formatted disks to write data out for PC users.
For Ethernet, Apple started building in Ethernet as standard before PC makers. They sold a laptop with Ethernet built-in in 1994, this was unheard of on PC laptops.
As for AppleTalk, they pushed LocalTalk at a time before PCs had any built-in networking whatsoever, a PC network card cost a hundred bux and were only used by corporations whereas in the home if you had a Mac you could make a network with a printer cable between two machines, Apple got it for cheap by spending an extra 10 bucks on RS-422 for their serial ports, why wouldn't you advertise that?
If you're talking about AppleTalk the network protocol rather than LocalTalk the physical protocol, Apple bundled TCP/IP with MacOS before Windows did ("Trumpet WinSock" was third party software), back when Microsoft thought they could stop people from adopting the internet since "The Microsoft Network" was so going to be so much better.
Arguing that adopting the Apple making PowerPC machines adopting the Intel-defined USB which was already on PCs for years before was a means to keep people from moving data out from the "internet Mac" (which was advertised as letting you share information with the world with "there is no step 3") is just... it makes no sense.
iOS on the other hand... Completely different thing.
On all but the top tier MBPs, USB C ports on Macs have different specs for data transfer (often the ones on the right of the machine will have half the transfer speed).
The Intel MBPs had more variance, but they only had the 2+2 configurations in 2016 and 2017. The 2018 and 2019 generations had all full-speed ports.
I call bullshit on this. Ever since I am alive, I could always use the USB ports on my motherboard and PC case for charging and data transfer.
That same laptop, and a desktop PC I have, do not support USB-PD over USB-C, so only 5V/500mA trickle charging is supported. This isn't the charging direction I was thinking of originally, but since this seems to be the direction you're thinking of, it's worth mentioning.
Also, neither of these ports are Thunderbolt. I'm pretty sure they are USB 3.0 at least, which doesn't have terrible speed to be fair, but still is somewhat limiting at least as far as the laptop is concerned since it means there's no way to get PCIe speeds.
Granted, this is ~2019 era hardware, but nevertheless the USB-C ports are not nearly as useful as they could be.
I also elaborated that, even when we consider the other direction, i.e. host-to-peripheral charging, many USB-C ports on PCs only provide baseline USB power levels (aka "slow charging"). The implication (that I now make explicit) is that such poor charging performance would not justify removing all other ports from the computer. I didn't mention this originally, because I didn't think of it then, but now that you have brought it up, I would add it to my argument.
The crux of that argument was: USB-C as the only port type is acceptable as long as those USB-C ports are full featured. That means (again, to be explicit) that they support Thunderbolt, DisplayPort, and bidirectional USB-PD (aka "fast charging"), though obviously one of those directions is not applicable to hosts that have no battery (e.g. desktops).
In other words, if the USB-C ports are no better than USB-A ports, then they are not good enough to take the place of other, dedicated port types.