There's an important distinction here you're glossing over: unreliable, wireless, software-controlled Rube Goldberg-esque connections (bluetooth, wifi) can't possibly supersede reliable wired ones. Wired connections "just work" 99.999999% of the time, and when they don't, you can actually see and inspect the thing that connects your devices to troubleshoot it. Wireless works only when it feels like it.
VGA, on the other hand, was fully superseded by various digital video interfaces, and floppies were fully superseded by optical media and then various forms of cheap flash memory.
And I mean it. People do still miss headphone jacks, and people do still buy ethernet dongles for their laptops. People don't really miss floppies and CDs.
The MBP designers still bravely include the 3.5mm headphone jack [0], though it is certainly true that the iPhone designers courageously jettisoned the jack.
And in Jony Ive designs they've had it on the wrong side for years. The 2021 model finally moves it back the left side.
There are a LOT of us that still believe this was a horrible choice.
I love my AirPods. But the instant I have to start digging through screens to do a pairing dance with some third-party speakers, car stereo, etc, I pine for the simpler times when you could just plug in the AUX, and I mourn for what has been lost.
You can literally hear how much worse the bluetooth audio sounds in my wife's care compared to mine. She uses the aux port because it's so bad.
In particular there is a wide variety of required gain/impedance as well as multiple different proprietary options as people attempted to adopt it to add microphones, controls/signals, and/or video. This is why Android, Apple, Microsoft and Playstation all have incompatible accessories.
The number of contacts can vary between 2 and 5. The length of the primary contact is not consistent, thus the mechanism to retain the plug often does not engage. Likewise, there is no specification on overall plug size to guarantee a jack will fit into the device case.
Thats excluding other extensions such as toslink. It is also worth noting that making the wrong connection, e.g. attaching an AV output to an audio input, can physically damage equipment.
Generally what people see is that the headset they got for whatever device works and assume there is broad compatibility - but to work best the jack on the headset is being designed for and tested against a particular subset of supported phones/controllers/music players. And broader support is typically not possible without separate connectors (e.g. a headset cord sold for apple, for xbox, for playstation, for android).
Anyway, I'm happy they are including a genuine, pretend-spec'ed 3.5mm audio output jack in their newest laptops.
I thought it was a great idea, and I still do, but am so glad they removed it. It sounds great on paper, but practically, I used it for nothing other than adjusting brightness and volume.
> The butterfly keyboard was Ive shaving off 0.5mm of the width for a worse user experience with a higher production cost and less reliability.
Agreed. It really wasn't great. From a design perspective, it's quite clever, but from a usability perspective it was horrible.
> USB-C only was a philosophical move rather than a practical one that forced people everywhere to carry dongles.
Apple has a long, long history of doing this. Headphone jack? Gone. Ethernet port? Gone. VGA port? Gone. Floppy disk drive? Gone.
I'm fine with it in moderation, frankly. USB-C is so clearly the future that where I take offense is that the rest of Apple's lineup doesn't work with it (iPhones, AirPods, some iPads, etc.).
> Replaceable RAM and SSD being lost is still painful.
Perhaps, but now that RAM is not only part of the SoC but a significant reason that the SoC is so good (high bandwidth shared memory between CPU and GPU), it's a change I'm more than fine with.
> Ive is gone and every one of those decisions has been reversed or at least significantly amended. This is no accident.
Agreed. This finally, truly, feels like a Pro machine: "design first" is an approach for consumer products and, to Apple's credit, works very nicely on the iPad and iPhone and consumer MacBooks (generally). "Design first" for pro machines is great for the 3 minutes after opening the box, but when trying to do real work, you'd sacrifice all the bezels in the world to shave 30% off compile times.