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Oh god, why would you trade Ethernet for an SD card or video? I actually have the ethernet adapter as well as a VGA adapter, as I'm a traveling consultant who d

Oh god, why would you trade Ethernet for an SD card or video? I actually have the ethernet adapter as well as a VGA adapter, as I'm a traveling consultant who deals with many different environments and not all of them are state of the art. I've never used the Ethernet adapter, but I use the VGA adapter several times per year. I use the SD slot more than all of them combined, though, as my Time Machine disk goes in there. Really though, this just highlights the difference between how people use things. I cannot imagine why in the world you would want Ethernet, as it never gets used. You probably have a hard time wondering why they include an SD card reader. There are plenty of professionals out there who never use any of them. I've only had a 3.5mm plug in my Macbook Pro once or twice. For as much hate as adapters get, professional users are the least likely to lose them and the most likely to buy them. It doesn't make sense to make consumers buy adapters for things they use every day, but how many device-specific things do each of us have? How many of us have a box of cables, dongles, and plugs in our closet? All of us. There are a ton of different use cases for a pro device, and modularity really does make sense. I don't need Ethernet. I don't need a 3.5mm jack. I don't need HDMI. If I do need them (rarely), Apple makes a Thunderbolt adapter for it. It's the same reason many of us build our own PCs, so we can pick exactly what we want or do not want in our computers.

cjensen 10y ago
Note that the parent comment was emphatically speaking for himself, not all people. He is not pretending his list is universal. If the parent comment says he'd rather have Ethernet, well that's just his personal use. The parent comment was a nice start for a conversation: rather than trying to argue over the perfect computer for everyone, the parent starts a conversation with a list of things which are true for him.
- freehunter 10y ago
  Right. If you read my entire comment, you'd see the first part was my (intentionally heavy-handed) reaction to his personal preferences and the second part was my contribution to that broader conversation. My opinion is that modular machines are inherently professional. Anything that needs an adapter for daily use is not, in my opinion, consumer oriented. Professionals put up with modularity all the time, because "professional" is a very broad term and we all have wildly different needs. I'm agreeing that his needs are different from mine, and offering the opinion that this is exactly the reason I'm not upset about needing adapters for a Macbook Pro. I'd rather need an adapter for the few times I use VGA than sacrifice portability just to have a (for me) rarely-used port. I don't need a professional-level DAC integrated. What I do need is a serial port, but it would be crazy for me to demand Apple put in a serial port when a USB adapter works just fine for the very few people who actually need serial.
DigitalJack 10y ago
You time-machine to an SD card? That's interesting to me. How big is your card?
- freehunter 10y ago
  I have a 128GB SD card backing up just my documents directory, so it's able to hold about a month of data before it starts rolling off.
Roboprog 10y ago
I like the idea of a large SD card for Time Machine. I have external USB connected drives, though. I use wired networking every day at work (alas, with a USB adapter now, since the hardware that hooked everything up to thunderbolt broke) - wifi is frowned upon in that environment.

cjensen 10y ago

Note that the parent comment was emphatically speaking for himself, not all people. He is not pretending his list is universal. If the parent comment says he'd rather have Ethernet, well that's just his personal use. The parent comment was a nice start for a conversation: rather than trying to argue over the perfect computer for everyone, the parent starts a conversation with a list of things which are true for him.

freehunter 10y ago
Right. If you read my entire comment, you'd see the first part was my (intentionally heavy-handed) reaction to his personal preferences and the second part was my contribution to that broader conversation. My opinion is that modular machines are inherently professional. Anything that needs an adapter for daily use is not, in my opinion, consumer oriented. Professionals put up with modularity all the time, because "professional" is a very broad term and we all have wildly different needs. I'm agreeing that his needs are different from mine, and offering the opinion that this is exactly the reason I'm not upset about needing adapters for a Macbook Pro. I'd rather need an adapter for the few times I use VGA than sacrifice portability just to have a (for me) rarely-used port. I don't need a professional-level DAC integrated. What I do need is a serial port, but it would be crazy for me to demand Apple put in a serial port when a USB adapter works just fine for the very few people who actually need serial.

DigitalJack 10y ago

You time-machine to an SD card? That's interesting to me. How big is your card?

freehunter 10y ago
I have a 128GB SD card backing up just my documents directory, so it's able to hold about a month of data before it starts rolling off.

Roboprog 10y ago

I like the idea of a large SD card for Time Machine. I have external USB connected drives, though. I use wired networking every day at work (alas, with a USB adapter now, since the hardware that hooked everything up to thunderbolt broke) - wifi is frowned upon in that environment.