I think part of this transition is Apple subtly suggesting that people don't need to have their laptops plugged in as a default any longer. The Magsafe is so easy to attach, most people I know have one in their usual work spot and just snap it on every time they sit down there, even if it's just for 10 minutes to check email. The comparative inconvenience of the USB connector means they will likely be a little more intentional about plugging it in...but the incredible battery life of these devices now means you really don't need to. There's no need to snake a power cable to your table at the coffee shop when your laptop gets 10+ hours of battery life. You don't even need to plug it in on your desk at home, or working in your bed, on the couch...if you're just plugging it in on a side table when you close it up for the night now, the whole tripping hazard becomes a pretty moot point.

Edit: ah, I see jakobegger has beat me to this comment below ;)

Again, this: "You don't need to plug in your laptop all the time" works for the regular MacBook, but we are talking about the 'Pro' line here, MagSafe should be standard.

I have a 2014 13" MacBook Air which had the same claims, and yes I could get 12 hours if I didn't do anything on it.

My battery is now about 80% of its original health, and if I'm lucky will last 4-5 hours while coding (terminal + browser + music). I expect it would be a lot shorter if I'm doing photo / video / music editing. Watching videos it can just about last 3 hours.

Ok it's better than 1-2 hours when MagSafe was introduced, but it's still a long way from all-day battery life when you only need to charge overnight.

* A dedicated power port takes up space; now you can use it for data too.

* If a USB-C cable breaks, it's a lot cheaper to replace than an entire power brick.

* There are ports on both sides of the laptop, so you can now charge from either side – this reduces cable strain.

* And, as you say, it's a standard. As USB-C cords become ubiquitous, you'll be able to charge anywhere (or from a battery pack even).

It seems like a good decision all told, though I'll miss MagSafe too.

Today, I only charge my Macbook Pro at my desk, where there's no danger of accidental cable-yanking. A full charge easily lasts all day, so when I'm out it's never actually connected to anything.

The aluminium unibody construction and solid state drives also make it a lot more sturdy. So when it does drop, chances are good it wont actually break.

For these reasons, I don't think that Magsafe chargers are necessary anymore. And considering how expensive replacement Apple chargers are, I'm happy they're moving to an open standard!

It killed it. The screen didn't break, not a scratch in sight, but it went dead all the same. The screen would not cut on. Plugging in an external monitor worked with heavy artifacts; I suspect some GPU damage.

I could not log in (it locked up after the fall when logging in with the external screen) and my work replaced it.

Freak accident but falls still kill MacBooks.

EDIT:

Also, without a charger, IntelliJ slurps up enough power I can't last more than a couple hours of dev time. Even that is generous.

As for reliability, I've dropped this same laptop from about 4 feet off the ground on the corner pretty much flattening the rounded edge and it's been fine.

Yet another way that Apple don't care about people that use their stuff, and why i'm buying a Chromebook to replace my Macbook Pro where i'll SSH to servers instead of compiling locally.

This is a good take. I hadn't thought of this argument before. It makes sense.

I know I'm in the habit of keeping my laptop plugged in as much as possible for those times when I do need to rely on the battery. I generally get only half a day with my MBA (13" early 2015) running multiple JVMs, Mail, and Safari with lots of tabs. I do find I get better performance when I turn off WiFi and dim the screen.

According to the tech specs, my laptop should get "Up to 12 hours wireless web". The 13" MacBook Pro with Touch Bar specs at "Up to 10 hours wireless web". I wonder if this means I'll get less unplugged time with the MBP.

I do this too. But also for another reason, I try to reduce battery usage to increase the lifetime of the battery. I should probably research whether this is something I should actually be concerned about (anyone any ideas?)

Which kinda sucks if you have glued in batteries...

https://www.quora.com/Is-it-recommended-to-unplug-a-MacBook-...

I usually work from a café these days, and I go from 100% to 0% in about 4 hours (15'' Retina, Mid 2015). I mostly run VSCode, Vagrant, Safari, Slack, Spotify and Terminal. Of these, Spotify, Terminal, Slack and Safari are easily the most energy-sucking apps.

I mostly use Safari, Postbox, Sublime Text, Coda, Cathode, Tower, Parallels (rarely on battery) and Xojo. I wonder if Sublime is more power efficient than VS Code.

It's too bad we'll never know what would have happened under Jobs.

What annoys me is that for example Lenovo has 30 notebook models... so how much effort would it have been for Apple to release a laptop that accommodates real professional users a little bit, with, say: a 5th laptop option?

For those exceptions to the "almost" never—mostly IT people doing field support—they make a litany of adapters. Adapters make sense for this use-case: the target type of user already carries many in a "toolbox", and this is just adding on a few more.

And don't forget the Mac Pro. Apple's own internal "real professional users" are, as far as I know, more likely to use a Mac Pro at their desks and then a MacBook for mobile portability—but they won't bother to try to do work with the MacBook that'd be better done on the Mac Pro. Which includes plugging strange peripherals into it.

Your experience echo mine. I love the new keyboard very much, no problem typing on it. It even has a pleasing sound when i am typing on them. It invokes ASMR. It doesn't feel too heavy, I can bring it around on one hand just fine. The build quality is amazing. Performance is good. From fully charged I can use it all day without charging. I am very much satisfied.

Yes. I don't have a new MacBook but I have a USB C phone, and the prospect of not having to have different chargers (and the ability to get another one without paying ~$90) is super attractive. I'm not sure if iPhone will ever move past Lightning, but I can imagine everything else low voltage moving to USB-C.

Sure, it is slower than the charger that came with the device, but if you only charge overnight, it doesn't matter much

My point is that most phone chargers will give you less than 1A, that means they would charge one of these laptops very slowly, maybe not even providing enough power to keep the laptop running if the battery is low.

You're still going to want to bring the laptop charging brick wherever you go.

Spot on. The move towards USB-C is for the better since it's one port to do it all, but charging via USB-C seems going backwards. I wonder how much of a technical challenge it would have been to let users do it both ways.