It's all part of change. It's inconvenient(change) when done well, and absolutely show-stopping when done poorly. Apple took a ham-fisted approach to this, and decided you should go through that right now. Not a lot of choice left to people like you(those with significant hardware investments) beyond using refurb gear, or spending a large sum on a brand new set of hardware and accessories(which will go through this same cycle again in the future).
It kind of all stinks, but there isn't a terrible lot us little people can do about it.
They're still putting that crap* in interfaces!
*Note, I say "crap" only because I'm not cool enough to have any ADAT interfaces.
What is that interface? And it's not supported through the USB-C interface?
It's like if we had no common way of measuring things. Imagine having to walk around with like 10 different tape measures because there was no standard. It's stupid. All of these different port interfaces are just like that.
Your view is short-sighted. You're saying "What about me? What about right now?".
Suppose I bite the bullet and switch to Windows? Apple's lost me then. They're not going to win me back. And that's not just the Mac. That's maybe my next phone. My next pad. My next router (oh wait, they're getting out of the wireless router game too).
Losing customers who have been with them for decades, who have spent thousands and thousands of dollars on their products and will stop? That fucking well matters.
As for losing customers, well, then we will look at the sales numbers.
I wasn't "happy" with the new MacBook Pro lineup, but I personally love the direction they're going. The only bad thing is the price increase, but they will drop the price.
But for your "I'm a customer I matter" comment. No you don't. Apple isn't going to let people who want a gigantic laptop with a million different ports get in the way of a wireless or standardized port world. I hate the fact that my work monitors have all these connections. You have all these cords coming out, different port types that do the same thing, and how many times has somebody gone to a meeting only to have to bring some dongle or find out that they have hdmi and the conference room is vga only or something? All of that is stupid. It's 2016. We can do better. I don't want to be tethered to the wall or a some device like a slave.
Wasn't that my original argument?
Out of pure curiosity, when's the last time Apple lowered the price of an existing product?
http://blog.fosketts.net/2016/10/29/total-nightmare-usb-c-th...
Any recording interface more substantial than a headphone jack is wired. It's going to remain that way for a while. Audio is a quasi-realtime problem with a lot of bandwidth. Neither Bluetooth nor 802.11 are really reliable enough for the task, and won't be for some time to come.
Preserving investment in hardware that works, rather than making a risky expenditure on hardware that may or many not work (and will change process), isn't "Luddite". It's realist. We have the same problem with much more static tech, like ATMs and voting machines. The "one single port" dream you're spouting? I've heard that dream before. It was called "Firewire" back then. Another decade or so, and we'll be digging Lightning connectors out of our junk drawer and saying "Hey, remember this? Do we even need to keep this anymore?"
But this is where I get pragmatic. I know I have compatibility issues, so I'm looking at semi-retiring the MBP just for the heavy lifting and compatibility of audio, and maybe looking at what else can be done about photo editing. And a Chromebook for web browsing and other not-hard-work sounds better and better all the time.