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Comment by higherpurpose | Hacker News Reader

For all of Apple's focus on "simplicity" and "elegance" in design and whatnot, the company sure makes you carry a shitload of ugly dongles and extra cables and adapters along with your iDevices.

Wouldn't they be more elegant if they would, you know...Just Work?!

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During my day to day use, the only time I plug in to anything is when I sit at my desk, power, Thunderbolt and HDMI to get a glorious three display setup out of my MBPr.

That being said, when I am in meetings, or on the move for work, I don't carry dongles with me. Pure laptop for me. All of our meeting spaces have Airplay compatible projectors, so I sit down, make sure I am on wifi and connect to the display.

Transferring large files? We've got 1 Gbit to our desks, I can sling data from our Denver location to our St. Louis location at almost 300 Mbit/sec sustained. Also, wireless N/AC throughout the building.

In the world where you no longer NEED those ports, having a smaller lighter laptop makes all the difference. I already don't carry dongles with me, the new laptop with less ports wouldn't change that.

Depends on the world you travel in. And I don't mean third world, first world, I mean the sort of places you have to visit.

Most defense facilities will NOT have wifi, and their meeting rooms will still have projectors with VGA in only. For travelers in the world that I inhabit, all those ports are a necessity. We would even still love to have a DB9 serial port because we often connect to embedded systems with serial consoles.

You and I live in different worlds, even though we both probably work on very technically involved things.

Eh … if you need a dongle maybe it’s just not, you know, for you? What a novel concept!

I practically never plug anything into my laptop except the charging cable. I suspect there are many people like me out there. This one is for use, not for you. Apple isn’t into being all things to all people, you know. Or at least their single products never are. Sometimes something is just not for you and that’s ok.

Then why put a data port on it at all? Either they expect you to do everything through the cloud or they don't. If they expected enough people to plug stuff into it that it was worth putting a USB port on it, that means expect that the same people would sometimes do that while it was charging (given that these things last through a day of heavy use at best). Which means they do expect people to have to use a dongle.

Huh? That’s just an incoherent statement. You are inventing false dichotomies. That’s just so absurd.

They don't make you. Apple's approach is you do everything wirelessly. For the laggards, well, you might need an adapter or two, but it's still more portable than a thicker and heavier laptop.

Laggards? Have you ever actually tried to work on wireless peripherals?

I use a wireless mouse and connect to the Internet wirelessly. My external HDD is over USB, but the latency (from it not being an SSD) is bad enough that wireless would change nothing.

For something that is performed several times per day (plugging in/out) I appreciate the clear superiority of Lightning cables.

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