Right now I use a MacBook Pro to do my work ("pro", remember?). I need a faster machine, so I will have to upgrade. And I will have to deal with all the dongles, carrying them, remembering about them, losing them, etc. I expect I will eventually make an idiot of myself in front of a client, once they hand me a flash drive with their data and I'll have to admit red-faced that I forgot the dongle thingy.

MacBook Pro used to have the "pro" philosophy: stick every port in there, so that the only thing you have to carry is your macbook and you're ready for everything. Then it started: ethernet disappeared, DVI went away, and successively all ports went away until now we are stuck with 4 ports of the same kind, that are useless (but hey, they show great promise!).

I don't want a thinner machine. I don't need a lighter machine. I need a machine so that I can do my work. Pro, remember?

Price is largely not an issue if you actually use it for work, so I have no complaints there.

You do not need to buy a dozen Apple dongles, just one USB-C dock/hub/whatever, with the ports that you regularly use. Have one on your desk with monitor, drives, keyboard, mouse, network all connected so you only plug in one cable.

When you go on the road you might want a dock with HDMI so you can plug in to various displays. But you won't need a dozen dongles. Just a hub.

It is just a slightly different way of working rather than plugging all the cables into the laptop and having a huge clumsy mess.

Then Apple is not the company for you. They have always been first to obsolete things. Remember the hoopla when they canned the DVD drive? Firewire? Literally every other port that isnt USBC

The author's definition of Pro also includes 16GB RAM, but most posts I've seen complain about not being able to order 32GB RAM. It seems that Apple can't win no matter what they do.

(tbh, avoiding sd and hdmi doesn't make sense to me. What do you have to lose?)

USB-C works with all the monitor you have and also with all the monitors you'll have.

You can use any port on the laptop and crucially charge the laptop and connect to a display with the same cable, and can be even used to connect to other peripherals using the same cable.

Your argument is that you don't want to spend $10 in adapters, you'll end up spending more in the future and be limited in terms of compatibility with newer hardware.

"Stick every Port in it" is ridiculous also.

What laptop does have Ethernet, infiniband, USB-A/B/C, thunderbolt 2.0, miniDisplayPort, MiniUSB, MicroUSB, RS232, Centronics, PS/2, VGA, EGA, PCMCIA, SCSI, eSATA, S-video, etc?

Yes, "every" port is ridiculous. In particular, I think most people would happily do away with anything that hasn't been in wide use in new hardware over the last decade.

I like machines with a port for wired network, a port or two for wired video, an SD slot, and 3-4 USB ports in a mix of USB-A and USB-C. For a Mac, I'd argue that some Thunderbolt ports would make good sense, too. I'd rather have my laptop be a self-contained system than have my bag filled with the half-dozen converter dongles that I'd need to provide the connectivity that I use with my current machine.

There are reasons for this no happening. TB3 is compatible with USB Type-C port format, it has a very high bandwidth and it's supported by Intel.

One of the things I actually dislike about it: a port can be USB-C without being TB3. That's going to be fun with the plain USB-C port in my laptop.

> a port can be USB-C without being TB3

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12824538

It is dominant in the market where USB falls short, that's what matters.

> It is dominant in the market where USB falls short, that's what matters.

It isn't dominant in the market yet, and that's my entire point. When it is: cool. I don't have much argument against it (aside from the dongle-hell I'll be living in). But right now, I don't own a device with any version of Thunderbolt, even with several new laptops around.

I hate on board ethernet, it's stupid, almost all of them have only one NIC and only 1Gbps, which is laughable in this day, much more in the 4 or 5 years a laptop usually lasts.

So... welcome TB 3.0 (which can be used for 40Gbps daisy chain networking), and 10GbE adapters someday or another.

Why would you need more than one NIC on a laptop?

Ethernet is ubiquitous in corporate. I'm yet to see an office with Thunderbird ports.

My point was that adapters are something that I have to think about, carry separately, and sometimes forget or lose.

I don't know why people keep repeating "USB-C works with X" (replace X with whatever). It might work if I get all the dongles. For the moment, as I said, out of ~40 devices around me there are exactly ZERO that I can plug into the new machine.

Also, let's not get into extremes here: I would not complain if they at least kept at least one or two USB 3 ports.

This is Apple we're talking about. The only thing they've ever sold at a $10 price point is the MagSafe 1 to MagSafe 2 adapter. And, frankly, even that was overpriced.

Meanwhile, all those craptastic laptops that are "better than the MacBook Pro", you'll have to buy a specific adapter from the OEM.

Is that really what you want?

More correctly, tells Apple that they can disappoint and dictate to some of their customers.

Whether it's a problem for Apple is, of course, dependent on whether it disappoints enough customers sufficiently.

My sense is that they will continue to appeal to a large number of people who want highly attractive, easy to use, reasonably capable, reasonably portable kit. They will also continue to attract those who wish to service said people.

What they'll fail to do is continue to service the more niche clientele who traditionally swore by Apple e.g. non-Apple ecosystem devs and heavy duty media makers.

I'm not hugely happy about this trend as I'm sort of in one of these niches. I'd quite like to have access to a big, expandable chunk of kit that has Apple's traditional build quality.

But I'm still likely to upgrade to a 7 when my contract renews as I have a pair of Bluetooth headphones. I mean, I use my phone for appy things and music when I'm travelling. In that regard I'm really not niche at all.

Yes, I could drop another $40 to get that functionality back, but then I sacrifice simultaneous charging. It's hard not to see this as being pushed around by a bully who's after your lunch money (for arbitrarily large values of "lunch money") sometimes.

I'll stick with a 6S for as long as I can, and hopefully this situation will be resolved somehow before then. Maybe they'll release another SE-like device that has a physical headphone jack again, but I'm not holding my breath.

Why not introducing USB-C on the iPhone 7 and makes it easy for the new MBP crowd? It seems the 2 teams didn't talk. Samsung could pull off the same stunt.

Criticism isn't hate. Blind loyalty isn't love.

Please, be specific.

Ever since my first computer 35 years ago, I've dreamed of the day when we could get rid of all these individual ports and finally have the One True Connector.

Yeah, the transition period sucks. Yeah, you'll have to buy $25 dongles. So what? There's a usb-c dongle that has HDMI, SD card reader, and 4 usb 3 type A ports on it for $30. Done. Problem solved. Stop bitching.

I still have old style keyboard to ps/2 adapters, ps/2 to usb adapters, composite to VGA adapters, VGA to DVI adapters, DVI to HDMI adapters, HDMI to thunderbolt adapters, serial and parallel to USB adapters, IDE to SATA adapters, SATA to USB adapters... And now I'm glad to see that era is finally at an end.

And in a few years when there are no more peripherals using outdated ports, nobody will even remember this time, or your griping.

But the headphone jack? No, that one is Apple pushing people around. It's not to make the phone "thinner" because that fugly lens protrusion is hideous, and the 7 is exactly as thick as the 6S, anyway. It's not to make the phone "waterproof"; $.00000002/phone worth of silicone around the jack could have done that. As Schiller himself said, it "comes down to one word — courage."

It's purely about seeing if they can dictate to their customers, and people are lining up, all, "Shut up and take my money!"

EDIT: vulgarity.

Once again, problem solved.

Can we please at least have the same conversation? Or are you more interested in down-shouting anyone who has this objection with "quit your bitching" and "problem solved"?

One connector. Not one connector except for this one I particularly like.

And that's why I say I like a company with the balls to bring in the future, even if it pisses off the minority that clings tenaciously to its old tech.

Most of the best headphone companies are not experts in digital-analog conversion. Nor should they need to be, because having a separate usb audio interface built into every set of headphones is a stupid idea.

It's fine if all you want to use is the absolute crap Apple earbuds, but for people like me who have spent a lot of money on nice headphones, it's ridiculous. If you want to use quality headphones or IEMs, they don't come with USB connectors, and I pray they never need to because that's a stupid idea.

I don't care either way because I hate Apple's business practices and would never purchase their products, but I think Apple will have to backflip on their "courage" on this one.

Even people drinking the Apple kool-aid seem to be angry about this headscratcher. Maybe the base of people who care about what headphones they use won't be large enough to change their "courageous" minds though. Apple doesn't care about professionals and they don't care about audiophiles. I think especially antagonizing the professional market will hurt them in the medium term.

Nevermind. Sorry for the noise.

The anger/frustration about the new models is about accepting that my time with the mac might be over (a ride which I began back in the OS 8 days). However, seeing how disappointed I've been has only strengthened my resolve to switch as I don't feel I should become that emotionally attached to a company or product (I went through the OS holy wars as a middle schooler, so I can forgive it as a folly of my youth).

That model has slower RAM and I'd guess, based on that, an older generation CPU. Lower clock, too. May as well buy a '15 refurb.

[EDIT] discovered via Wikipedia that it is the same processor generation, just a weaker version. Also, USB-C ports cut down from 4 to 2. The non-touchbar Macbook seems to be designed to make people not buy it. And it's still more expensive than the previous entry level.

The one with physical function keys is less powerful.

MBP would be a fine laptop for a twice less cost. There are cheaper decent alternatives.

And four USB-C 3.1 ports with TB 3.0?

And a TouchBar?

And really last 10 hours on battery (Microsoft advertised 12 for the SurfaceBook and it only lasted 6 on the same test the MBP lasted 10)

I dont know where you got the $500 touchbar, and I don't want to know.

Still waiting...

> I dont know where you got the $500 touchbar, and I don't want to know.

A small hint, just compare prices for touchbar based laptops and those with usual fn keys (13 inch model is optionally shipped with usual fn keys, not the 15 inch though).

It's better to get HP x360 for $1300 with i7-7500U / 512 SSD / 16GB Ram (which in addition has a touch screen and it's convertible) than a slightly worse Macbook for $2000.

I get what you're saying about the over-hype and I'm not about to dump my MBP. I don't think anyone is going to produce as high of a quality product anytime soon, but it does leave me curious what else is out there.

This is exactly what I'm doing. I run Spacemacs in a Ubuntu VM running on Parallels. I'm not too sure if I would be willing to move away from the OS X apps ecosystem though (I use 1Password, Day One, OmniFocus, iBooks, Notes, Photos etc and they all sync perfectly with the iPhone).

There are a lot of well-built machines out there once you leave the bargain bin--Lenovo for example.

Let us just acknowledge it for what it is, posturing.

Apple MBP is nice, but lacks Ethernet, a headphone jack, function keys and a SD card reader, all deal breakers to me. And no, dongles don't qualify.