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Comment by Bud | Hacker News Reader

>We lose good functionality for no good reason, other than products become "simpler" and "more pure".

You can disagree with the reasons, and certainly many do, but it's just silliness to allege that moving to USB-C was done for "no good reason".

It's the exact same silliness that surfaced in the griping about removing 9-pin serial ports, and optical drives, and Ethernet ports in laptops, and FireWire in favor of something more than an order of magnitude faster, and every other innovation by Apple.

It's always for a good reason.

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Actually, I never mentioned USB-C.

But let's take it as an example: adding USB-C was a great idea.

Removing every other kind of port, including the fantastic Magsafe, on the other hand, was a bad idea. Many people try to justify it by saying that it had to be done so that we can "make progress". Well I'm fine with progress, but I don't want to be held hostage. And it certainly feels like it: if I buy the new Macbook, I will be able to connect exactly ZERO of my devices to it.

But — what I actually meant was things like magsafe, charging light on magsafe, function keys, Esc key, little wire organizers on the charger, keyboard key travel, or the headphone jack on the iPhone. You could easily make the same case for battery life (I'd happily trade 2mm of thickness for longer battery life) and ports: I really don't care that much about thickness, so don't sacrifice ports to make my machine 2mm thinner. Again: we lose good functionality for no good reason.

Sorry, I don't find the MagSafe fantastic at all, at least not in the MagSafe 2 incarnation. The thing detaches far too easily for my liking, leaving me ever more frustrated. It's the only thing I dislike about my 15" rMBP

Agree. The first MagSafe from 2009 worked, but I went through multiple chargers. The MagSafe on my new MBP (previous gen) doesn't work nearly as well, and just disconnects every time.

Why would you want to move to USB-C other than not having to flip the cable when you inevitably put it in the wrong way.

If your answer is power delivery, remember that not all cables and not all devices support power delivery on USB-C so it's nothing that couldn't have been done with "USB4" utilising the same plug we've always had.

Few reasons for me:

* HDMI and DP alt modes make laptop docks a lot cheaper and more universal

* Don't need an OTG cable to use a Type-C device on my Type-C phone

* Potential Thunderbolt 3 port reuse

Well, not always. Removing the iPhone headphone jack was dumb and pointless.

Losing the ethernet jack on Pro laptops is also pretty bad. The reason is thinness, I dunno if that's good or not. WiFi is sufficient for most people, but it sure as hell isn't better when you need high bandwidth and consistent low latency.

> Removing the iPhone headphone jack was dumb and pointless.

I suspect there was a point. This is part of Apple's standard MO.

It's a way to wean people onto wireless (BT). Apple's expensive BT headphones point the way to cheap third party BT headphones that aren't painful to connect (right now bluetooth infrastructure is pretty sucky).

Once people are comfortable without the headphone wires they will have inductive charging like the watch and have a water resistant device like the new watch.

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