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I'd go further and say that Apple isn't basing their hardware strategy on the needs of any real person. It's a laptop with only USB-C ports (and the 13-inch onl
by bodas 8y ago
I'd go further and say that Apple isn't basing their hardware strategy on the needs of any real person. It's a laptop with only USB-C ports (and the 13-inch only has two of them). You can't even plug a USB stick into it. The only people who asked for a laptop like that are working at Apple.
- CharlesW 8y ago> You can't even plug a USB stick into it. You can via an adapter[1] or hub. FWIW, even today this is fairly rare (once so far this year for me) since Dropbox tends to be the new "USB stick". [1] https://www.monoprice.com/product?p_id=13507 https://www.monoprice.com/product?p_id=13507
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- lclarkmichalek 8y agoHonestly, I've been working with the USB-C only MBP as my only development machine for a year now, and I haven't once wished it had a classic USB port on it. At my desk it's plugged into monitors which have ports on them. Having a single cable for all my peripherals is quite nice.
- bodas 8y agoIf it's meant to be used at a desk all the time why does it have to be thin and light?
- lclarkmichalek 8y agoBecause I go to meetings and work from home sometimes. Only thing I'd use a standard USB for would be charging, which isn't really something I do in meetings, and I have plenty of chargers at home.
- bodas 8y agoAs someone who occasionally writes apps for iPhone I have to use the USB port all the damn time.
- briandear 8y agoThey make thunderbolt lightning cables.
- indemnity 8y agoHave you tried the WiFi running/debugging? Works pretty well for me.
- jason_slack 8y agoGood point. I forget about Wifi running and debugging.
- blhack 8y agoThis is seriously where we're supposed to be for a pro laptop? It shouldn't work "pretty well" when you're using a $2000+ machine. It should work perfectly every single time. This is what built apple into the company it is. "pretty well" wasn't good enough. This sounds like the type of concession I would have made in 2005 on my gentoo laptop. "Yeah, USB doesn't work, but there is a workaround that sends that data over wifi! It even usually works!"
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- ataturk 8y agoIt's decent when your employer springs for a "dock" type devices that allows a single USBC hookup to the laptop, including power, which is the setup I had at my previous role. It sucks when you have to attach and detach a whole bunch of dongles each time you sit down at your desk, as with my current role. I could buy the dock thing myself I suppose, but then it's personal property I have to worry about and could disappear, etc.
- EpicEng 8y agoI see this so often it's becoming ridiculous. "pfft, it works fine as long as you use it less like a desktop!" We'll I can build a much more capable desktop for one third the price, so no thanks. If the intention is to use it as a desktop then why keep sacrificing function for fractions of a mm?
- derefr 8y agoThe intention isn't to use it as a desktop. The intention is to not plug anything into the computer (other than the charging cable, sometime) except when using it as a desktop. Everything is wireless these days. Input devices, audio devices, networking. You basically only need a cable to charge the thing (with your USB-C charger), for mass storage (where most new mass-storage devices are USB-C devices as well, and if you have a well-used old one you can keep a dongle stuck to it), and for displays (at which point you are in a "docked" use-case, and so you can just use a USB-C dock or Thunderbolt-display-with-dock.) All other use-cases are so rare or esoteric that you can just put them off until you get home and to your desk. Or are you constantly balancing your laptop and a USB-only printer on your lap or something?
- garmaine 8y agoPortable console via USB-A KVM switch. I often do find myself balancing a laptop next to a rack of servers.
- llampx 8y agoSo as soon as I get up from the desk I should stop using anything USB? Never connect to anything HDMI unless I'm at my own desk? I think that's preposterous. Not to mention, Apple wouldn't be selling very many dongles if this was really how most people used their laptops.
- statictype 8y agoYour monitor supports usb c and has ports on them? Do you feel this is a standard setup that more than 10% of the market have?
- lallysingh 8y agoThe Mac's market share is roughly 10%. But in the high end, where all the profit is.
- lclarkmichalek 8y agoI use two Apple displays, which have thunderbolt I think? I use an adaptor for that anyway. No, I'm very lucky to be provided with good resources where I work.
- imron 8y ago> and I haven't once wished it had a classic USB port on it. While I haven't missed classic USB (thanks to a dongle with old USB slots) I have however wished I still had a magsafe power cord. It also doesn't help that the dongle I bought is a multi port one (ethernet, USB-A, HDMI and others) and for whatever reason, using it on battery noticably reduces battery life.
- Osmium 8y ago> I'd go further and say that Apple isn't basing their hardware strategy on the needs of any real person. Real person here! I love the USB-C only approach. I love being able to charge from either side of my laptop, and I love having single cable to plug in at my desk for RAID/monitor/ethernet/charging/etc. I want my laptop minimal; if I want it to do more, I can add more.
- ambulancechaser 8y agoyou're extolling the benefits of USB-C not the lack of USB-A. The presence of a USB-A would not affect your listed benefits in the least.
- godzillabrennus 8y agoIt would increase the thickness of the laptop. Apple is design driven. I also hate the new keyboard but couldn’t care less about using dongles if I get a thinner laptop.
- TheSpiceIsLife 8y agoI don't understand. At this point, what are the benefits of a thinner laptop? Lighter I can understand, but what does a thinner laptop enable you to do?
- twblalock 8y agoIt takes up less space when folded in a bag, in luggage, etc., so it is less of a burden to bring with you when you go somewhere. How would you feel if your laptop suddenly doubled in thickness but didn’t gain any weight? Most people would be unhappy about that.
- dahauns 8y agoAlways with the hyperbole. How would you feel if your laptop suddenly increased 2mm in thickness but didn't gain any weight? Most people wouldn't even notice the difference if you didn't point it out to them.
- chrisseaton 8y ago> You can't even plug a USB stick into it. I don't think I've used, or seen anyone else use, a USB stick in about a decade. We can't just keep these legacy ports around forever, cluttering up our devices.
- josephg 8y agoI use USB sticks semi regularly and I have a USB-c MacBook Pro. I picked up a few USB sticks with dual A and C plugs on them. They work a treat.
- sumedh 8y ago> I use USB sticks semi regularly What do you use it for, is it something dropbox or others cannot do?
- mirimir 8y agoBandwidth is much greater.
- sumedh 8y agoYes but I am pretty sure there very few people who need so much bandwidth and you can always buy a usb c flash drive.
- mirimir 8y agoTrue, I guess. And I'm one of them. Sometimes I use numerous Linux, Windows or macOS VMs for testing stuff. At 5-10GB per VM, that's way too much for my system array. So I use LUKS-encrypted HDDs and SSDs via USB. With my pitiful uplink, cloud storage for hundreds of GB would be unworkable. And yes, I could use USB-C.
- likeclockwork 8y agoWhen did the sneakernet become a foreign concept to hackers?
- Stratoscope 8y agoLately I've been working at a company that uses YubiKeys for 2FA. You can use a traditional YubiKey, but the YubiKey Nano is especially popular because you can put it in your laptop and leave it there. It barely sticks out at all, just enough that you can touch it and activate the touch sensor. [1] I started noticing people in meetings with their new MacBook Pros and six inch cords sticking out the side, and on closer inspection, there was a YubiKey Nano plugged in at the end of the cord. Meanwhile, the folks with ThinkPads or older MacBooks just had a Nano tucked into one of their USB-A ports like it was no big deal. I know which I would pick. [1] https://www.amazon.com/dp/B018Y1XXT6/ https://www.amazon.com/dp/B018Y1XXT6/
- megablast 8y agoYes, I too base my decisions of which laptop to buy based on how a YubiKey looks.
- Stratoscope 8y agoIt's not just a cosmetic issue. The people with the six inch cords are leaving them plugged into the laptop all the time as they walk around the building, just like the people with the USB-A ports are leaving their YubiKeys plugged in all the time. The difference is that if they bump into somebody or something, that dongle is likely to get broken, and it could even damage the USB-C port in the MacBook. That's not going to happen with a Nano plugged directly into a USB-A port.
- glhaynes 8y agoRight, it’s important that the whole world stand still for a decade because of some fucking “YubiKey dongle”.
- llampx 8y agoCalm down. It's not just YubiKey. The world isn't moving to USB-C everything for a while yet.
- pdpi 8y ago
- ubernostrum 8y agoA while back someone posted an article comparing Nikon and Canon in the professional photography market starting in around the 1970s. Tellingly, Nikon did what HN seems to want: they had a very conservative approach to "pro" model cameras, emphasizing backwards compatibility and respecting what their "pro" users asked for. Canon, on the other hand, experimented a lot and, despite not actually inventing many of the new ideas, was willing to try them out on "pro" cameras. This difference of approach cost Nikon its leading market share among "pro" users. There may be a lesson there.
- birken 8y agoThe 13-inch Macbook Pro has 4 USB-C ports
- danieldk 8y agoOnly the TouchBar version. The MacBook Pro Escape has 2 USB-C ports. https://www.apple.com/macbook-pro/specs/ https://www.apple.com/macbook-pro/specs/
- akhilcacharya 8y agoYup. If it had an equivalent number of IO+Power I wouldn’t mind as much. Right now I have power, 1 USB, and 2 monitors (1 HDMI, 1 TB2) on my 2015. I can’t do that at all without an extra dock on a non-touchbar.
- derefr 8y ago> You can't even plug a USB stick into it. You mean a USB-A stick. There are USB-C sticks!
- MarkusAllen 8y agoWe can get a 256 GB USB-C stick for about $70 here: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B06XC1WGQR/ref=twister_B01IKC9ZW8?_encoding=UTF8&psc=1 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B06XC1WGQR/ref=twister_B01IKC9ZW8?... That is a heck of a lot less than purchasing for storage space when buying this laptop.
- chrismorgan 8y agoI recall a review in APC magazine in mid-2003 of Lindows, a live CD Linux distribution, mentioning that you could pair it with a “cheap-as-chips 128MB USB drive for $70” for persistent storage. The phrase stuck with me due to its absurdity—you can get a lot of chips for $70! Now, fifteen years later, you can almost get 2000× the storage for the same price. (I say “almost” as APC spoke of 70 AUD which is somewhat less than 70 USD.)
- rayiner 8y agoI recently used a USB stick for something other than reinstalling the OS for the first time in probably a decade.
- bigiain 8y ago"If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses." -- Henry Ford Nobody asked for USB ports when they had serial/parallel ports, or for the floppy drive to disappear, or to lose the VGA connector. I don't know if Apple have made the right calls here (on either the USB-C ports or the keyboard), but they do have some history in making eventually-winning calls on at least some of these things. (That _also_ built the Newton, so I'm not gonna claim they _always_ get it right.) It'll be interesting to see how these design decisions fare over then next 3-5 years...
- slavik81 8y ago> Nobody asked for USB ports when they had serial/parallel ports, or for the floppy drive to disappear, or to lose the VGA connector. I don't recall being annoyed by those changes. In particular, the VGA->DVI transition was handled really well. Just about everything was DVI-I and would accept a VGA signal over a DVI cable, so you just bought a VGA->DVI cable and continued using VGA.
- briandear 8y agoSo basically a “dongle?”
- slavik81 8y agoNo dongle at all. Just a different cable. The adapter cables are fine. It's the devices that aren't attached via cables that are awkward.
- bigiain 8y agoMacs with USB but no SCSI connector were a big cause of complaints where I was back then (I worked around lots of designers with SCSI Syquest and Zip drives, and all their client archives of high-res photoshop and page layout work on them), and _everybody_ in my circles thought Apple were insane for leaving floppy drives off... (These were a long time back though...)
- 8y ago
- bogomipz 8y agoIndeed and perhaps the height of absurdity - if you were to go buy a brand new iPhone 8 today, the cable that comes with the phone has a USB 3.0 connector not an USB-C connector at the far end. So you can't even plug a brand new iPhone 8 directly into a brand new Macbook Pro without buying a cable as a separate purchase.
- briandear 8y agoExcept you don’t need to, generally. Setting up a phone doesn’t require a computer connection and, since USB-A phone chargers are ubiquitous, it doesn’t make much sense to go Thunderbolt 3 on iPhone’s default cable yet because the days of the iTunes setup process are long gone. The primary use of that cable that comes with iPhone is for charging — and it does include a charger. Unless you are the .025% of iPhone owners that do development, your complaint really doesn’t matter. With AirDrop, AirPrint and iCloud, there really isn’t much point to connecting to a computer for the vast majority of users.
- Fomite 8y agoI can't remember the last time I plugged my iPhone or iPad into my computer. And I can remember the last time I borrowed someone's USB-2/3 charger. It was like, two days ago. I'm with Apple on this having been the right choice.
- bogomipz 8y ago>"Except you don’t need to, generally." Generally except if you commute/travel via long distance by train or bus and there is only one power outlet per passenger, and you need your phone as a modem for your laptop. Or at an airport with limited outlet availability. Or at a coffee shop with limited outlet availability. Or if you prefer to back up to your laptop locally via iTunes. >"Unless you are the .025% of iPhone owners that do development, your complaint really doesn’t matter." Telling people their view doesn't really matter on account of a statistic you completely made up? Dismissing others people's views because their use case differs from your own? Brilliant.
- llampx 8y ago
- TheAceOfHearts 8y agoTo add another point: I've had a 2017 MBP for over a year now and I don't mind that it only has USB-C plugs. I have an adapter for the rare cases when I want to plug in some older USB device. I actually really like their push towards USB-C everywhere. The only major device I own that doesn't use USB-C is actually my old iPad. If they killed their proprietary adapter in favor of USB-C I'd be very happy.