Re:Apple just told the world it has no idea who the Mac is for
by mindslight on Friday October 28, 2016 @04:41PM
(#12820463)
What you're describing is actually a longstanding way of working, called a dock. Docks are fantastic when you don't have a proper desktop computer - drop your laptop in, and have all that nice desktop hardware.
But, besides having a singular environment, a dock isn't so useful when you have an actual desktop computer. Especially these days when laptops top out at half the RAM and cores as a baseline desktop.
When my laptop is functioning as a laptop, I still want connectivity. Both routine (SD/USB drives, headphones, HSM if I ever find a good Free one), and all the useful ports for ad-hoc situations (eg wired ethernet). Some of these do go away with time (eg RS-232), but prematurely deprecating still-popular ports and pretending that dongles are a decent solution for portable connectivity is ridiculous.
Re:Apple just told the world it has no idea who the Mac is for
by plussed_reader on Friday October 28, 2016 @04:18PM
(#12820228)
Except the IO is split between two sides of the new machine. Maybe each connection has its own bus, but if its like thunderbolt on the MBPs with a physical FW800, those two ports share a bus. That still means half of the IO would not be useable in a 'dock' situation.
No more docking to one side of the machine...
At your desk you have some mini docking station that powers your laptop and connects it to monitors, wired mice, the Wacom tablet, the network, the thumb drive, speakers, cameras, mobile phones and everything else.
Then, on the road or at home you just have the one dongle that you plug normal USB stuff, the ethernet and maybe an SD card into. You power the computer with the adaptor it came with and not the docking station.
In this new future there is one or maybe two leads connecting the computer to stuff. It does not have a forest of leads sprouting out of every side except the front, everything is neat and less likely to break. I am not an Apple fan and I prefer mini USB to whatever it is those Apple things have. However I think Apple are right to sort the ports out properly.
The other oft-quoted problem with the new Apple machines is the max memory, I feel that some explanation is needed for that as quite a few Intel high end low power CPUs are limited to 16Gb RAM, as are their own NUC computers. So there is nothing sinister going on here, it is just a choice of low power/battery life/cooling that Intel have forced on their customers where the compromise is the 16Gb max RAM.