Instead of having to replace the mag safe power brick for 85€ you can now just replace the cable for 55€.
However, it my personal experience, I've never had the cable fail, but I've had 2 mag safe power supplies fail (they started getting very hot while charging and at some point stopped working alltogether).
My girlfriend bought 100€ worth of adaptors for her Macbook Air and can never find them when she needs them.
For a desktop it doesn't matter, but for a portable device that you need to carry around every extra thing that you need to carry around is just something you are going to misplace.
I'm a hardcore apple fan (from before the iphone) and this hub situation is just pathetic, they should have put in an USB-A in there and call it a day.
You can run into some VGA projectors but most have HDMI now though.
I'm not going to deny that having them built in is better but I had a tiny case that fit my MBA power adapter, USB-C cable pocket wifi, and hub. Since I always needed the power adaptor and it's cable it wasn't hard to keep the hub with me.
Nasty much? We like jumping on to blame `lusers` here on HN, but this is a design problem. It's a fact of life people lose things, and Apple conveniently forgot about this to push the dongle ecosystem.
The magic that originally brought me into the Mac ecosystem, after a decade and a half of Windows and Linux, was that the work MacBook I received was the first time I had an actual portable computer. The battery life ("you mean it still has a useful amount of charge after 3 hours? WTF is this sorcery!?"), good-enough trackpad (which makes it like 5x better than the best trackpad I'd used before, all of which had me considering an external mouse a must-have for more than 5 minutes of work), and port selection meant I could pick up my laptop—just my laptop—and go, and be fine for most or all of the day, doing almost anything.
The dongle bullshit (and the USB-C "well yes it can do that but only if you have exactly the right cable, so you'd better bring a couple with you" thing) broke that simplicity, and put me back to having to make sure I had other crap with me, which was a shame.
Dragging their feet on moving iPad and iPhone over to USB-C, so they could at least share dongles & charging cables with Mac laptops, was/is salt the wound.
Try Baseus USB C Hub Adapter for MacBook Pro 2020/2019/2018/2017, a 9-in-1 USB Type C Hub dongle with 2 Thunderbolt 3 ports (40Gbps), 4K HDMI (60hz on USB-C, 30hz on HDMI), RJ45 Ethernet, USB-C data port, 3x USB 3.0, and audio:
Unlike single pigtail all-in-one dongles, this two piece no pigtail thingy supports 2x TB3 or 2x USB-C/DisplayPort displays since it is tapping both sides of laptop. (Incidentally this also lets you charge on the right to prevent potential issues with charging from left.)
> Handwriting is probably the slowest input method ever invented. ... We reimagined it and what we're doing is completely different than what they (Microsoft) did. ... And what we said at the very beginning is if you need a stylus, you've failed.
This was for devices that only worked with a stylus, so if you lost the stylus you couldn't use most features of the device anymore.
Modern styluses like the Surface Tablet Pen or Apple Pencil are for drawing and note-taking, in addition to still being able to use fingers on the touchscreen.
I think Jobs had a point about designs that require a stylus. There were many portable computers before the iPhone that required a stylus. iOS was designed with fingers in mind and then added a stylus for some kinds of work. This is similar to how the original Macintosh had no arrow keys and forced developers to design for the mouse. Later designs then added arrow keys.
>people lose things, and Apple conveniently forgot about this to push the dongle ecosystem.
I think it's a bit unfair to say that Apple deliberately change interfaces in order to push their adapters.
They've got 2 different problems to address, firstly they want to update and be in control of the interfaces to their hardware, Firewire,Thunderbolt,USB-C but, at the same time their machines seem to last quite a long time, so at any time there's a pretty significant number of users stuck on older interfaces and with hardware that uses older interfaces too (e.g. I have an older Firewire external hd that I now dongle to Thunderbolt, have noooo idea how I'm going to get that to work when I get this new machine).
So in order to allow all that to work they need to support a multitude of interfaces because getting a new laptop shouldn't mean throwing everything else out.
>Firewire external hd that I now dongle to Thunderbolt, have noooo idea how I'm going to get that to work).
Simply add another dongle, the Apple “Thunderbolt 3 (USB-C) to Thunderbolt 2 Adapter” and you’re good to go.
I just tested mine before posting this, from a FW800 drive with the Apple FireWire-Thunderbolt adapter plugged in to the Apple Thunderbolt 2-3 adapter. Works on M1 Macs too.
Out of all the complaints about moving to USB-C, the idea that it is a conspiracy on Apple's part to sell dongles is the one that makes me roll my eyes the hardest. Say what you will about the USB-C-only MacBooks we've had in the last six years or so, but I'm fairly sure they were the first portable computers Apple ever shipped that had no proprietary connectors. No ADB, no MagSafe, no FireWire (not technically proprietary but largely DOA anywhere but Apple in the early 2000s).
I suspect if Apple had a magic wand (and/or even more of their money), they wouldn't have you buy dongles at all, they would have you buy new cables. Which is what I did years ago -- USB-C to Lightning, USB-C to mini-USB, USB-C to USB-A, even one USB-C to USB-B kicking around somewhere. And, because USB-C is not a proprietary standard, I don't think any of those cables are from Apple.
(Yes, I do have an Apple brand USB-C to USB-A dongle that I bought when I got my first USB-C laptop, because everyone was screaming how important they were. I almost never use it: if I find myself using it more than a few times for "dongle + cable", then I buy the correct cable.)
Apple isn't trying to push a dongle ecosystem. they're trying to push a "thunderbolt/usb-c for everything" ecosystem. In typical Apple fashion, they're willing to be pretty radical about it on the computers themselves, and let donglepocalypse be a side effect.
And at the same time, their non-pro machines come with only one spare (not for power) USB-C port. If they loaded up their machines with them across the board, this would be less of an issue.
You can use the power port to connect a dongle too. I have two dongles that have multiple interfaces, as well as a power passthrough so I could connect my power to either one of them. Though I don't use either because my usb-c monitor powers the MacBook.
That is a very welcome improvement! I like scaling my display a bit so I have more real estate, but then the fonts get a bit blurry. 10% more resolution sounds great!
Who do you think is responsible for the new iMacs?
They took a very versatile all-in-one, removed almost all of the ports and added an external power brick -- just to make it a bit thinner. Which is even more ridiculous considering it's a desktop.
The iMacs have almost always been just laptop components in a display case (I'm obviously excluding the iMac Pro). I think getting rid of the USB-A ports is fine, and the SD card slot was always in a weird, hard to reach spot.
I guess they fill a niche for some? My best guess is that these were a compromise with what the M1 could then do. It's kind of the same reason we didn't have M1 MBPs last year. That's just a guess though.
I hope to see less-compromised M1 iMacs in the future though.
It will of course work with other monitors, but there aren't that many high res monitors out there. The Apple display is the only 6k monitor I know of. There are a few 5k monitors and lots of 4k monitors.
There's one 8k monitor from Dell, but I don't think it's supported by macOS yet.
I didn't even notice that they were full height. There was something off aesthetically when I saw the pictures of the new keyboard and I figured it was just the missing touch bar.
As a touch bar hater from the beginning, I'm super excited to be able to hit keys to play/pause/skip music, mute, and adjust brightness without having to look at the touch bar to do it.
HP accidentally revoked a code signing certificate recently. Since certificates are regularly checked for revocation by macOS, suddenly all HP printers stopped working on macOS.
It took a few weeks until everything was fixed again for me, I had to reinstall drivers from Apple and HP multiple times. But my mom still hasn't gotten her HP inkjet to work since then.
Add to that the fact that they sent firmware updates that caused printers to stop working with 3rd party ink -- I'm never buying anything from HP again.
I'm reminded of another story I read (probably on HN), where they showed architectural plans / designs from either 19th or early 20th century, from a time when houses where decorated with intricate stucco. The plans showed none of the beautiful stucco. The plans just showed the layout, and left the detailed design of the decoration to the craftsmen.
I think we often have it the wrong way around, nowadays. The project outline may specify to use Twitter bootstrap or Google material design (are those still a thing? It's been a while since I've done client work) but the important design, like UI flow etc is often left the implementor.
Then you end up with a crappy app that looks nice on screenshots, and people wonder why nobody lkkes it.
However, it my personal experience, I've never had the cable fail, but I've had 2 mag safe power supplies fail (they started getting very hot while charging and at some point stopped working alltogether).