Its temporary. In five years everything will have these ports and adapters will not be necessary. In the same way today you can get a DP to VGA adapter instead of having a bulky analog video output, even if it costs $15.
I have a nice integrated laptop but I have all these parts around in my bag that I sometimes lose or forget connected to a projector somewhere. What may have seem like a simpler solution really wasn't in the end.
VGA's popular because it's the only option that actually works for everyone, and it's not for a lack of newer alternatives - in fact, the plethora of newer alternatives is the problem here.
Otherwise, completely agree - the current situation is messed up. Yet I'm glad Apple is leading the way, just like with SSDs.
Full disclosure: I don't own any Apple products or stock.
Having a ton of adapters seems to be required for that niche
But the vast majority of people never have to make presentations or hook up to legacy projectors and monitors. So bulking up the machine itself to accommodate that does not really make sense.
I don't want to shell out another $900 monitor to replace my existing $900 monitor that adds no new features on top of what I had previously.
Can we stop with this meme? There's no tax. There's a price for a product. Buy it or don't. I have followed the laptop market quite closely for very many years and I'm consistently disappointed in my attempts to find non-Apple laptops that are of comparable quality and specs at similar price points. And let's stop pretending that "specs" are simply "cpu/ram/harddrive", as those are a small subset of the factors that matter to consumers.
I am all for portability but there comes a point where you start trimming essential functions. I'm not saying every laptop needs to have a SCSI port, but ONE connector?! I thought Apple was bad before with two USB slots and mini-DP. My Thinkpad Yoga, which I bought specifically for portability, manages to have 2 USB connectors, HDMI, built-in SD card reader, and other useful peripherals onboard, and yes, I do actually use these.
I think MacBooks are cool but I always find myself unable to use them for serious work. If I was a casual computer user that just needed to update Facebook once in a while, they'd probably be fine, but every time I've tried something more serious than that with one, I've ended up on a non-Apple product because why torture myself over fashion?
Granted, most of what I do with my MBP is modern full-stack stuff, which I gather doesn't qualify as "serious" even if it does make me a good living. But I don't see how the type and number of ports on my laptop would make much difference if I were, say, writing Linux kernel modules for hardware nobody uses, or building a window manager in Haskell, or whatever the current definition of "serious" is among those who put so much weight on the term. I need to plug in a real keyboard; all else is commentary. (And who does embedded away from home, anyway? There's too much you need besides the computer, unless you're targeting an emulator, in which case what need have you of physical ports?)
But, hey, it's always easier to feel superior than it is to see the other guy's point of view.
At the moment, the two USB ports I have on my MBP are pretty much bare minimum but every now and then I find myself juggling peripherals.
You might consider the same cheat I use for charging, which is to keep a small but reasonably capacious USB battery [1] in my bag, and top it up via USB whenever I happen to have a port free. Since it's specified to fully charge an iPad twice, it can charge my phone several times before running flat, and a fully powered USB port can charge the battery itself in a matter of a few hours -- an overnight charge is ample. (And, hey, the only thing I ever plug in my phone for anyway is power, so it's not like I'm losing anything by not plugging into a port on my laptop.)
Another trick worth considering is, instead of using a USB headset, instead to use one which connects via the headphone jack proper. Mine is a Sennheiser HD558 with an aftermarket cable incorporating an Apple-style mic/remote module, but you don't have to get that elaborate, especially since the HD558 isn't designed to travel and does not do so well; for simple VoIP purposes, anything halfway decent will do, and serve the purpose of freeing up a USB port for things that a headphone jack can't do.
[1] http://www.nothingbutsavings.com/Product/270265-APB27US-Targ...
Do we care more about having the sexiest laptop in the airport or getting more productive time in? That's the dilemma one goes through when choosing PC v. Mac.
The sine qua non of a computer's usefulness to me is its ability to support Emacs. While my experience has been that, all else equal, any portable machine is inferior for this purpose to any desktop, I have yet to find a better portable Emacs machine than the 15" rMBP. When I do find one, I'll use it instead.
If your "all Apple users are fashion-obsessed lightweights" proposition is susceptible to the white raven's disproof, this should amply suffice. (When was the last time you ran across an Emacs user who was either "fashion-obsessed" or "lightweight"?) But I suspect you'll prefer to explain away a white raven, than to reconsider your apparent confusion of reality with an "I'm a Mac, I'm a PC" ad.
That's just me. A few of those things could be transferred to wireless peripherals, but not all of them, and wireless peripherals usually suck pretty bad. I have a Bluetooth headset that I try to use in the field occasionally and it's a nightmare switching between A2DP and telephony modes. I could switch to a wireless mouse, but then that's batteries and many of these take up a USB port anyway with a proprietary dongle. I don't usually carry a full keyboard around with me so I just gotta use what they have in the office, which again, even if it's wireless, often occupies a USB port.
To me, this is serious. I don't think I'm doing anything super special; I'm definitely not writing custom firmware for esoteric embedded devices from Starbucks or anything like that. Just your everyday developer and sysadmin.
Now, if I put a lot of effort into it and decided I was going to live on a MBP and therefore needed to keep my usage restrained to one or two USB ports max, I may be able to come up with an arrangement that works, but it's by no means the default; I most recently tried to live off a MBP for 5 months in the first half of 2013, and it didn't work out (the lack of ports was a constant annoyance, but not the impetus behind the change). I swapped it for a Thinkpad and was much happier. I find this happens to me every time I try to live off an MBP. The most successful run I had was 2006-2008 where an MBP was my sole laptop and I did a lot of remote work, but it was not really pleasant and I had a desktop that I used to supplement.
To be clear, I have bought 3 Apple laptops over the years of my own free will and used a few more that were owned by employers. It's not that I hate them (in fact I continue to be astonished by Retina displays, which I was sure was just going to be hype before I saw it in person, and wish PC makers would catch up), but I just don't think they're good workhorse machines for people who do real work. I think they're mostly a fashion thing that people force themselves to live with. I'd love to have one around the house as a casual computing machine, but it's hard to justify dropping $2k for the setup, when again, there is real work that would be better served by the same investment going to actually useful equipment or to labor.
I just don't really see a reason to force myself to heed Apple's insistence that while I think I may want more than two ports, I really don't. Even the way I use Apple hardware usually pisses off Mac devotees -- back in 2006 I made some permanent enemies out of a few acquaintances that were stunned I would be voluntarily using Fedora on a MacBook Pro. They kept repeating that they'd totally understand if it was a PC, but if I had to use Linux on a Mac, I was most likely just a retard who couldn't grasp the beauty gifted to earth by Humanity's Eminent Genius Steve Jobs. They continued this hostility every other time I saw them. Pretty bizarre.
Hey, I have one of these... it's called an iPod shuffle.
Which curiously uses the headphone jack as an USB port[1].
Perhaps there's hope for someone to hack up at least an USB2.0 port on the MacBook using this method?
[1] http://www.blogcdn.com/www.engadget.com/media/2006/11/usb-ip...
Congratulations, you've identified the target market for the new MacBook.
As far as I can tell, the market for Apple's laptops are normal hipsters, hipster devs that can't stop talking about how you can build a blog in only two hours with Ruby on Rails, video and photo editors clinging to the meme from the 80s that editing software is somehow superior on a Mac, and college students that don't want the embarrassment of using an "old person's computer".
or: $70-odd additional margin for Apple that people will be happy to pay once they notice they need it regularly. Clever.