Well you’re in the wrong that the machine you want really is worse for most people’s usage habits. Almost everyone only has lots of cables attached to their laptop when it’s at their main desk. In other usage cases, at a cafe, on a plane, or even doing a presentation you are likely to have nothing connected, or power only, or at max power, a thumb drive and video out for doing a presentation.
The new macbook pro has the ports to cover those usage cases. A USB-C or TB Dock with everything plugged in at your main desk that stays plugged in to all your devices really is a better solution than having all the ports directly in your laptop, plug one cable in when you get back and everything is connected. And by your own admission you use the optical drive “only from time to time”, well most people don’t want to lug around the weight of an optical drive they might only use a few times a year. Leave your $30 USB optical drive plugged in at your main desk, sorted.
There is a lot of grumbling as usual, but I predict these laptops will be popular and sell well.
There are similar magnetic breakaway cables available for the USB-C port, although I don’t know if that’s what Apple supplies as standard with the machine.
There are two good reasons not to keep the form factor.
Existing ports can’t handle the power. If you make a power cable that fits into an existing USB port, people will try to plug it into an existing USB port, and bad things will happen very shortly thereafter
It’s too damned big. You can’t use existing USB on phones.
So you’re going to have another standard anyway, and it’s going to be able to carry enough power to charge a computer, so let’s make everything use the new standard.
I ordered a new Macbook Pro a few hours after the new models went on sale. I should have it sometime near the end of November. I’ll post back here once I have an opinion about it.
FTR, I ordered a 15" and upgraded the processor (to the 2.9GHz), the graphics card (to the Radeon 460 w/4G RAM) and the storage (to 1G). I would have gone with the max 2G storage, but they just wanted too much (and extra $800).
It was a lot more money than a comparable PC would have cost, but I anticipate using it without trouble for 8-10 years. I paid a decent sum for my Mac Pro back in 2008, and i’m still using it for everything from browsing the internet (and The SDMB, natch) to recording, editing and mastering music, video, to CAD work, etc. So I have no regrets about the money I spent on the Mac Pro; I’m hoping I have a similarly good experience with the Macbook Pro.
That isn’t really a problem, as you don’t need to have the same form factor for input. Just that it will accept the same plug. Ala eSATA, which actually contains a USB port plus a little more.
And you can make the USB-C device negotiate before it actually sends power, the same way USB devices already do for high power.
That is indeed a better reason. I hadn’t realized how small they are.
I would then only argue that you need to keep both ports around for a while. New devices can use USB-C cables with small adapters you never take off. The above mentioned negotiations would prevent those adapters from being used to connect power cables to the adapter to the USB-A port. No negotiation, no power.
I wasn’t familiar with eSATA, but I agree that that would be a nice upgrade path if size were less important.
One Port To Rule Them All is worth some pain in the meantime, though.
Also I’m very much looking forward to never having to care which way my cables are oriented, which would be more challenging with any existing-USB compatible form factor.
I’m not in the market for a new MacBook right now, but in principal the change doesn’t bother me that much, as I’ve been through it before. My last tower was a Performa 6400, and I needed SCSI for the scanner, CD burner, and Zip drive. I needed ADB for the keyboard and mouse. I needed LocalTalk with an adapter to connect to my home LAN so I could transfer files between my Acer laptop, and share my ISDN internet to the Acer. I have no idea how I connected my digital camera’s serial interface (probably through an ADB adapter).
Then the iMac arrived, and it only had USB and FireWire, and despite having to sell most of my (at the time) expensive peripherals, the pain was temporary and completely worth it in the long run, just for the simplification it offered.
As is now I’m in the market for a DAS, and my choices are Thunderbolt 1, FireWire 2, or USB 2, and the same product from the same manufacturer (but with different interface) has really varied pricing. A single interface will certainly simplify these choices.
If my next Macs (including my desktop and servers) only have Thunderbolt 3 (which includes USB 3.1), I’ll adapt, and be happier for it in the long run.
You’re missing the point of this part of the discussion.
No one is saying that eSATA should be used over Thunderbolt. We’re saying that an upgrade path that allows for backwards compatibility with old cables (in the way that eSATA ports do with USB cables) would be nice. Although in this case isn’t realistic because USB-C needs to be smaller so it can be on smaller devices.
I’m a non-Apple person but I’m way past being a basher; head to head, most products are pretty much equivalent in function and capabilities.
But wow, does Apple seem to be in one of their “fuck you, customers, we’re smarter than you so just siddown and eat it” modes - unpopular and questionable changes to iPhone and Macbooks; holding the line on what Apple TV includes (which does not include Netflix, fa chrissakes); abandonment of larger-screen laptops when a good part of their core market is graphics-oriented people who can’t work on a 15 inch or smaller screen; limited or no upgradability to the new laptops… and I just saw a thing that indicates they market no fewer than 17 dongles and adapters to connect their limited port choices to the rest of the world.
A lot of Mac stalwarts looking over the more advanced and more user/market/continuity-focused Surface lineup, and saying so in print.
I’ve watched Apple do this before - as well as many other companies, most of which don’t survive such stumbles - and thought they’d learned their lesson about trying to dictate a narrow, peculiar vision of what’s appropriate.
The Netflix App runs on Apple TV devices, so it’s not like you can’t watch Netflix on one of them.
Netflix has not opted into the new “TV” app (what terrible fucking naming, by the way), presumably because Netflix has no interest in being “just another source of video” for Apple, and letting Apple get all that juicy data about what users like to watch.
It seems pretty great. The trackpad was the thing I was most worried about, and it’s not quite as good as Mac trackpads, but it’s certainly way better than most Windows or Chrome laptops I’ve used in the past few years.
The screen looks fine, although Windows kind of sucks at fonts, so if you’re looking at text in some places, it doesn’t look as good as my Macbook Air (even though the screen is higher resolution.
Benchmarked, it’s about 10% faster than the fastest CPU option on the Macbook Air. As specced, it’s faster than what’s in the low end Macbook Pro as well, although I haven’t found actual benchmarks yet.
Looks like the graphics benchmarks are ~30% slower than the low-end new Macbook Pro (although it’s got only about half as many pixels to push around, so that might not matter).
Wifi is flaky. It took me a while to be sure, since I thought it was my router. But other computers on the same wifi network are working fine. And the audio has weird clipping issues.
There’s stuff all over the internet about how Dell ships the XPS 13 with different wifi cards, and some of them are terrible.
Looks like there’s a possible problem in that if you have anything plugged into USB-C… the wifi stops working properly!
Love this guy but he does go on a bit - but gets to the point early in this.
Granted this is just one unit, but with someone here talking about flaky wifi too, it sounds rather worrisome. I think he’s spot-on also with demonstrating the experience of trying to get anything done on Macs these days just being barrier after barrier. He basically managed to do nothing of what he set out to achieve.
USB-C is a positive move and I’m perfectly happy with them pushing that forward - I wish they’d do the same with the iPhones instead of clinging on to that proprietary crap. Android phone manufacturers have had the head start on Type C, and it’s great to see manufacturers starting to keenly add it to computers - hopefully this means it’ll be more successful than that original Thunderbolt was, which practically only Apple bothered with.
It’s also great in that it does away with Magsafe. Yes it was a nice feature, but then your cord would fray after a few months and you’d have to either take a bit of a risk and crack the PSU open and solder in a new one yourself, or stump up about £70 for a new PSU. With USB-C, no bother, just grab another cable.
I do think PC laptops have a huge advantage of continuing to offer direct HDMI, USB and ethernet ports though. You’re always going to have that “I forgot my dongle” moment with USB-C-only machines, and these third party dongles that have been tested on PCs but not Macs and glitch out on Macs, etc.
My main gripes are still price and lack of possibility to upgrade/repair, and it appears the performance at least of this no-touch-bar model is kind of meh. Necessary for the portability they’re going for, but I think it’s a mistake not to offer a thicker, no-compromises model - whenever I see what Apple come up with, I just imagine that Steve Jobs left Apple with a binding, dying wish to continue making things as thin as possible at all costs (probably going to Hell for this, but I think under his unfortunate circumstances he may have had a psychological need to view the world as “getting thinner = good”) and that now they’re kind of stuck with it. So many of their problems could be resolved by just allowing things to be a few mm thicker.
Just had a revelation about the cost of my Mac(s): That Apple tax gets amortized over many years.
Thanks to Weasel Spice’s comment, I checked, and my MacBook Pro is close to five years old and no signs of age. My previous one lasted me seven. 7 years!
So I just realized that I tend to keep Macs a lot longer than other pieces of tech. And ironically since I do tech-y stuff at work, I’m too busy Gittin’ Sh!t Done to do any upgrades. My current MBP is still running 10.7, my earlier “Powerbook” was on System 9 forever. iPhone’s on ios 7.
My daughter bought a new MacBook, and I wish I could, but this 'Pro won’t die!
We have the same problem with our old Corolla…
(Note to S.Weasel: the new MacBook is very much the MacBook Air updated. When it comes time to replace your MBAir, you’ll have options)
I’m actually replacing my current Air with the new MacBook Pro, so you’re sort-of right, but the price is a lot higher. What’s happened is that they’ve got the weight of the Pro right down:
13" Air - 3lb
13" Pro - 3.5lb
15" Pro - 4.5lb (was 5.6lb)
So, effectively, I guess the Pro is an Air with much higher specs (and price). Not just updated, but a new high-end model.
Personally, this is what I pay the Apple premium for. I’m not a power user, I honestly don’t care that much about CPU or GPU performance within a wide margin. But now I can have this beautifully engineered slim & light machine with amazing battery life that will last for years. I have gone for the 15" this time – much smaller weight penalty now for the extra real estate.