With Bluetooth, the cloud and AirPlay, who even needs those ports? People are up in arms every time Apple changes/deletes ports and are almost always wrong.
Go ahead and stick with your thinkpad.
Go ahead and stick with your thinkpad.
College students? It's always a big hassle finding a dongle whenever a MacBook user has to give a presentation in class.
Personally, I think VGA is an abomination and people should react a bit stronger to be invited to a venue and having to deal with standards from 1987.
If you're going to harp on hospitality, please remember it cuts both ways.
Oh, forgot about iPads, 2 different ones for that, and android phones at least 2 MHL connectors and whatever google does in their phones. We haven't even got onto mini and micro HDMI.
At least 10 different connectors on recent devices then? Don't you just love standards?
To me, this is a great tradeoff: I get a lighter and thinner laptop for 100% of my computing, the downside being an adapter when I return the the dark ages of VGA connectors.
In fact, for my MacBook Pro, I will have fewer connections. Instead of power and Thunderbolt, I will just get one of the connectors that bridges power, external monitor and USB peripherals and plug in a single thing when I "dock" my laptop.
I will take that any day over the awkward Dell and Thinkpad docking stations I see my coworkers use.
I completely agree with this assessment. Even here on HN the majority of users are not giving presentations or even screen sharing. When it does matter, there is often a third party device they have to present from anway.
I'll take the adapter not being in the box, as for most users they won't be using it enough to warrant the extra cost.
Instead of buying mini DVI to VGA or Lightening to HDMI adapter, just buy this?
Wireless is usually OK in my living room but I would not count on wireless video working reliably in a conference room with 500 people on their laptop/phone. Shudder.
Moreover the YubiKey also acts as a PGP smartcard, giving you a private key (for e.g. SSH) that an attacker can't extract even if they obtain root on your laptop.
As much as I would like a "Retina MBA", the lack of a separate USB port is a dealbreaker for me too.
This is similar to standard SSH agent forwarding attacks. A sysadmin connects to a malicious server via SSH. If the sysadmin turns on agent forwarding, then "malicious root" can remotely ask the sysadmin's agent (running on the sysadmin's laptop) to authenticate to any other machine that accepts the sysadmin's public key. The malicious root can log in to any other server the sysadmin has access to, as long as the sysadmin still stays connected.
It's a slick device.
For the 2FA OTP portion: No. The button needs to be physically touched.
For the PGP (ssh) portion: Yes. (but again, the attacker can not obtain a copy of the private key, that's the critical difference to your scenario)
That's why (at least for critical servers) you should combine the two. That way an attacker can at most piggyback your connections. He can not initiate his own because he can not touch the button.