6 ms·

We're living in a transitory period as we move from a world of wires and connectors to a wireless world. This is the pain we have to endure as technology is pus

by muninn_ 10y ago

We're living in a transitory period as we move from a world of wires and connectors to a wireless world. This is the pain we have to endure as technology is pushed forward. If it were up to the luddites and their obsession with compatibility, a laptop would have a dvd drive, firewire, usb-a, usb-c, thunderbolt, hdmi, dvi, vga, sd, microsd,vga, and display port all in one laptop chassis. Having one single port, that can do all those things and do them just as well, is a far preferable alternative. Couple that with the future transition to wireless-only technology, and we're on our way to the future.

stuckagain 10y ago
As soon as someone invents an isochronous wireless interface with guaranteed throughput and latency, I'm sure all the recording studios will switch to that.
- muninn_ 10y ago
  Buy a desktop or a special interface port if you need something specialized.
  - avn2109 10y ago
    His point is that fundamental physics and information theory limit how good a wireless link can be. So wired links will always perform better and therefore high-end audio engineering will run cables forever.
    - beat 10y ago
      Technically, you could create an isosynchronous wireless protocol. But 802.11 ain't it, and neither is Bluetooth. Both are very tolerant of lag and have little guarantee of latency.
  - cwyers 10y ago
    "Buy a desktop" in a thread about deficiencies in Apple laptops is a joke, right?
    - muninn_ 10y ago
      It's not a deficiency. Laptops can't do everything. Apple can't build a computer that caters to every edge case. That's why I don't complain that I can't play the latest video games on my laptop, or run 50 VM boxes or something.
      - beat 10y ago
        But I'm not complaining that it can't do something magical and new. I'm complaining that it can't do what the same product could do from the same vendor five years ago.
      - cwyers 10y ago
        That's not my point. The new MacBooks may be disappointing, but they exist. The Mac Pro, iMac and Mac Mini didn't even get a refresh.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
- thatwebdude 10y ago
  Doubt it, they won't have any peripherals for their aging unconnected G4 tower.
emp_zealoth 10y ago
There will be no purely wireless ever. Wired interfaces have too many advantages coming directly from physics and their reliability is unparalelled. Personally I dont use anything wireless apart from WiFi, and even then only on my laptop
- gerbilly 10y ago
  You know what you find if you open up a wireless router? Wires! (Well traces anyway, but you know what I mean.)
beat 10y ago
This Luddite has rather a lot of money invested in a professional grade audio interface. Replacing it with modern connectivity would be upwards of a thousand dollars. Ouch. And it works perfectly. Why am I throwing away hardware that I like and trust for the relentless march to the future? 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.
- module0000 10y ago
  > Why am I throwing away hardware that I like and trust for the relentless march to the future? 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.
- bluejekyll 10y ago
  > ... professional grade audio interface. What is that interface? And it's not supported through the USB-C interface?
  - 10y ago
jayd16 10y ago
The pain is completely self imposed. Wired ports and wireless technology are not mutually exclusive. USB-C is great bit there's no reason to remove all other ports. Technology will get adopted. It doesn't have to be forced.
- ashark 10y ago
  IMO they should have given us one transition model before going all USBC. Leave one USBA, HDMI, sdcard slot (my wife and I use it all the time, and it is the pro after all, used by many in graphics arts, film, and photography). Downgrade power to USBC (yeah, losing magsafe or moving it to a dongle is a downgrade) if you must, replace the thunderbolts and other USBA with USBC. That way I'd have a chance to actually pick up any USBC devices whatsoever before moving to a laptop that can only connect to USBC without dongles. 'Cuz right now I have zero, and so does my Mac-only office. Even the couple of USBC Android testing phones floating around come with a to-A USB cable, so I'd have to buy a new cable for them.
- addicted 10y ago
  The people who compared the USB-C move to Apple's past moves were completely ignoring that in the past Apple replaced the FLoppy drive with the CD rom, but still kept all the other ports around. This time round Apple has replaced every port with a USB-C port, which means I don't need to transition only 1 interface. I need to transition all. And the most painful part about this move is they are doing it to the product line that in the past was loved because it came with USB + FW400 + FW800 + Video + Magsafe. IOW, a design goal for the Pro line used to be easy compatibility so professionals could end up in any situation and have a great chance of getting their computers to work with their environment without any adapters.
  - krallja 10y ago
    > Apple replaced the FLoppy drive with the CD rom, but still kept all the other ports around. What? That's not even close to true. The iMac replaced all of Apple's then-standard ports with USB. ADB: gone. Serial: gone. SCSI: gone.
FussyZeus 10y ago
Except there needs to be some BENEFITS on the other side. What you're saying is he should upgrade for the sake of upgrading, at great cost, to something that will do effectively the same thing except in a bass-ackwards fashion. I'm not opposed on principle to a Macbook with a touchbar but I'm not buying, why? Because it has plus or minus the same specs as my current model which also connects to my monitors and everything else I use. Why would I impose that cost and pain on myself? Just to have the latest and greatest for the sake of it? Screw that, I'd rather be a luddite than a lemming.
marcosdumay 10y ago
Let me see... My laptop has a DVD drive, USB 3 (A), HDMI, SD, and microSD. I already had to buy a DVI adaptor, and already had a VGA one. It works well. I just miss a 4rt USB port.
- muninn_ 10y ago
  You know what works better? One cable that does all of that or no cables at all.
duaneb 10y ago
This is exactly the type of attitude that makes me dread the future. Why invest in technology at all? Wires are great, honestly. Easy to debug and use. The original zero config.
- mitchty 10y ago
  I can tell you never used token ring. :)
  - bshimmin 10y ago
    Ha! Even Ethernet used to be a lot fiddlier in the '90s, when you had to worry about crossover vs patch cables.
  - orionblastar 10y ago
    How about trying to find the PC with the beaconing condition? That shuts down the entire ring? Usually someone copied another DOS PC configuration that uses the same Token Ring address. Engineers were good for that. 1994 or 1995 and they bought a new PC and instead of filling out sheets to have IT set up the PC they tried to do it themselves.
- muninn_ 10y ago
  Technology in this context isn't an investment. Wires aren't investments. Wires are a cost. Imagine if your kids grow up and never have to buy a single cable for anything. How much money would that save them over their lives? What if these kids grow up in a world where things are connected, seemingly alive, because they just know about the presence of other things and can "talk" to those things and do your bidding? This is what we're moving to. It sucks that people can't see that.
  - beat 10y ago
    This is only going to happen in the professional audio world if you can build wireless protocols with sufficient reliability in terms of latency - bandwidth isn't the problem, latency is. Neither Bluetooth nor 802.11 are designed for guaranteed latency. Firewire was designed explicitly for it. USB not so much, but it can be adequately faked. But wireless? I don't see that happening anytime soon. Right now, I can't get my computer to reliably do Bluetooth from ten feet away to handle a single one-way stereo stream. That's crap. So this wireless dream future? It's just a dream, for those who have more demanding needs than surfing the web.
douche 10y ago
My laptop has nearly all of those ports, and more besides. It's fantastic. The obsession with light weight and slimness is silly. Lugging around a five pound or even ten pound laptop is not that much of a burden. Wireless technology needs to get a whole lot more reliable to get its foot in my door.
- muninn_ 10y ago
  I don't really care for making the laptops increasingly thin, but the ports are just nonsense. Carrying around a 10 pound laptop with a trunk full of adapters is going to be a thing of the past and I can't wait for the future.
cc439 10y ago
The problem with USB-C as "the one port to rule them all" is that it is impossible to produce a cheap cable and still meet the design spec. Even major smartphone manufacturers have been caught including underspec cables with their phones that damage one device or the other right out of the box. This isn't just limited to USB-A to USB-C cables, there are plenty of USB-C to USB-C cables that pose a potential threat when pushed to their power transmission limits. USB-C was a great idea taken one step too far. USB-C would be perfect if it hadn't been saddled with the requirement to handle 100 Watts of power. That's an overkill requirement for a feature that wasn't demanded by anyone aside from OEMs looking to cut an additional charging port off the bill of materials.

by muninn_ 10y ago

stuckagain 10y ago

As soon as someone invents an isochronous wireless interface with guaranteed throughput and latency, I'm sure all the recording studios will switch to that.

muninn_ 10y ago
Buy a desktop or a special interface port if you need something specialized.
- avn2109 10y ago
  His point is that fundamental physics and information theory limit how good a wireless link can be. So wired links will always perform better and therefore high-end audio engineering will run cables forever.
  - beat 10y ago
    Technically, you could create an isosynchronous wireless protocol. But 802.11 ain't it, and neither is Bluetooth. Both are very tolerant of lag and have little guarantee of latency.
- cwyers 10y ago
  "Buy a desktop" in a thread about deficiencies in Apple laptops is a joke, right?
  - muninn_ 10y ago
    It's not a deficiency. Laptops can't do everything. Apple can't build a computer that caters to every edge case. That's why I don't complain that I can't play the latest video games on my laptop, or run 50 VM boxes or something.
    - beat 10y ago
      But I'm not complaining that it can't do something magical and new. I'm complaining that it can't do what the same product could do from the same vendor five years ago.
    - cwyers 10y ago
      That's not my point. The new MacBooks may be disappointing, but they exist. The Mac Pro, iMac and Mac Mini didn't even get a refresh.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
thatwebdude 10y ago
Doubt it, they won't have any peripherals for their aging unconnected G4 tower.

emp_zealoth 10y ago

There will be no purely wireless ever. Wired interfaces have too many advantages coming directly from physics and their reliability is unparalelled. Personally I dont use anything wireless apart from WiFi, and even then only on my laptop

gerbilly 10y ago
You know what you find if you open up a wireless router? Wires! (Well traces anyway, but you know what I mean.)

beat 10y ago

This Luddite has rather a lot of money invested in a professional grade audio interface. Replacing it with modern connectivity would be upwards of a thousand dollars. Ouch. And it works perfectly. Why am I throwing away hardware that I like and trust for the relentless march to the future? 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.

module0000 10y ago
> Why am I throwing away hardware that I like and trust for the relentless march to the future? 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.
bluejekyll 10y ago
> ... professional grade audio interface. What is that interface? And it's not supported through the USB-C interface?
- 10y ago

jayd16 10y ago

The pain is completely self imposed. Wired ports and wireless technology are not mutually exclusive. USB-C is great bit there's no reason to remove all other ports. Technology will get adopted. It doesn't have to be forced.

ashark 10y ago
IMO they should have given us one transition model before going all USBC. Leave one USBA, HDMI, sdcard slot (my wife and I use it all the time, and it is the pro after all, used by many in graphics arts, film, and photography). Downgrade power to USBC (yeah, losing magsafe or moving it to a dongle is a downgrade) if you must, replace the thunderbolts and other USBA with USBC. That way I'd have a chance to actually pick up any USBC devices whatsoever before moving to a laptop that can only connect to USBC without dongles. 'Cuz right now I have zero, and so does my Mac-only office. Even the couple of USBC Android testing phones floating around come with a to-A USB cable, so I'd have to buy a new cable for them.
addicted 10y ago
The people who compared the USB-C move to Apple's past moves were completely ignoring that in the past Apple replaced the FLoppy drive with the CD rom, but still kept all the other ports around. This time round Apple has replaced every port with a USB-C port, which means I don't need to transition only 1 interface. I need to transition all. And the most painful part about this move is they are doing it to the product line that in the past was loved because it came with USB + FW400 + FW800 + Video + Magsafe. IOW, a design goal for the Pro line used to be easy compatibility so professionals could end up in any situation and have a great chance of getting their computers to work with their environment without any adapters.
- krallja 10y ago
  > Apple replaced the FLoppy drive with the CD rom, but still kept all the other ports around. What? That's not even close to true. The iMac replaced all of Apple's then-standard ports with USB. ADB: gone. Serial: gone. SCSI: gone.

FussyZeus 10y ago

Except there needs to be some BENEFITS on the other side. What you're saying is he should upgrade for the sake of upgrading, at great cost, to something that will do effectively the same thing except in a bass-ackwards fashion. I'm not opposed on principle to a Macbook with a touchbar but I'm not buying, why? Because it has plus or minus the same specs as my current model which also connects to my monitors and everything else I use. Why would I impose that cost and pain on myself? Just to have the latest and greatest for the sake of it? Screw that, I'd rather be a luddite than a lemming.

marcosdumay 10y ago

Let me see... My laptop has a DVD drive, USB 3 (A), HDMI, SD, and microSD. I already had to buy a DVI adaptor, and already had a VGA one. It works well. I just miss a 4rt USB port.

muninn_ 10y ago
You know what works better? One cable that does all of that or no cables at all.

duaneb 10y ago

This is exactly the type of attitude that makes me dread the future. Why invest in technology at all? Wires are great, honestly. Easy to debug and use. The original zero config.

mitchty 10y ago
I can tell you never used token ring. :)
- bshimmin 10y ago
  Ha! Even Ethernet used to be a lot fiddlier in the '90s, when you had to worry about crossover vs patch cables.
- orionblastar 10y ago
  How about trying to find the PC with the beaconing condition? That shuts down the entire ring? Usually someone copied another DOS PC configuration that uses the same Token Ring address. Engineers were good for that. 1994 or 1995 and they bought a new PC and instead of filling out sheets to have IT set up the PC they tried to do it themselves.
muninn_ 10y ago
Technology in this context isn't an investment. Wires aren't investments. Wires are a cost. Imagine if your kids grow up and never have to buy a single cable for anything. How much money would that save them over their lives? What if these kids grow up in a world where things are connected, seemingly alive, because they just know about the presence of other things and can "talk" to those things and do your bidding? This is what we're moving to. It sucks that people can't see that.
- beat 10y ago
  This is only going to happen in the professional audio world if you can build wireless protocols with sufficient reliability in terms of latency - bandwidth isn't the problem, latency is. Neither Bluetooth nor 802.11 are designed for guaranteed latency. Firewire was designed explicitly for it. USB not so much, but it can be adequately faked. But wireless? I don't see that happening anytime soon. Right now, I can't get my computer to reliably do Bluetooth from ten feet away to handle a single one-way stereo stream. That's crap. So this wireless dream future? It's just a dream, for those who have more demanding needs than surfing the web.

douche 10y ago

My laptop has nearly all of those ports, and more besides. It's fantastic. The obsession with light weight and slimness is silly. Lugging around a five pound or even ten pound laptop is not that much of a burden. Wireless technology needs to get a whole lot more reliable to get its foot in my door.

muninn_ 10y ago
I don't really care for making the laptops increasingly thin, but the ports are just nonsense. Carrying around a 10 pound laptop with a trunk full of adapters is going to be a thing of the past and I can't wait for the future.

cc439 10y ago

The problem with USB-C as "the one port to rule them all" is that it is impossible to produce a cheap cable and still meet the design spec. Even major smartphone manufacturers have been caught including underspec cables with their phones that damage one device or the other right out of the box. This isn't just limited to USB-A to USB-C cables, there are plenty of USB-C to USB-C cables that pose a potential threat when pushed to their power transmission limits. USB-C was a great idea taken one step too far. USB-C would be perfect if it hadn't been saddled with the requirement to handle 100 Watts of power. That's an overkill requirement for a feature that wasn't demanded by anyone aside from OEMs looking to cut an additional charging port off the bill of materials.