also dvd, ethernet, hdmi, vga and floppy, yeah.
sorry, i want neither of these in my laptop. i want it to be lightweight, small, solid and durable body without moving parts or too many holes.
what you want is achievable with dock station.
Thinkpad T480s weights about the same as the current MBP, has more useful ports (I find having hdmi, ethernet and older usb handy on a device I use in my work trips), good keyboard, replaceable hardware and whatnot. It is bigger, but Lenovo makes smaller Thinkpads too. Subjectively, I find it more robust than my MBP at work, but that's not the point.
The point is, the sacrifices Apple makes on their current Macbook Pros are simply design choices, not engineering tradeoffs.
of course this is all subjective, use whatever works best for you.
This is what I mean: make a laptop for people who need stuff like SD card readers and USB, and make another for people who don't. The way I see the breakdown is the "pro" or "air" lines.
Outside of phones, MicroSD isn't really used, and nobody uses MicroSD for transferring files.
SD cards are still the standard format for cameras, which are the main use case for SD card slots.
A perfect example of this: I was recently at EDC, a massive music festival in Nevada, and one of our lighting displays had its controller stop working. I had my laptop with me, though, so I installed the control software on it. The comical part was that I had to plug I first a dongle to get USB, and then ANOTHER dongle to get Ethernet (controllers like this talk over artnet).
It was just really annoying. It felt like I was using a fashion device for work.
They could even call it "macbook professional" or something like that.
/s
There is just absolutely no reason for these changes. The lack of USB ports on this laptop is something that I absolutely have not gotten used to. While I've been able to make due with the keyboard, I dug my old 2013 MBP out today, and instead of feeling bulky and old, it just felt good. If the screen hadn't become so badly delaminated, I'd probably switch back to it full time and just eat the ~$2300 loss on this thing (or maybe make it a desktop?).