Comment by mancerayder | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mancerayder | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

I care a lot about the Mac, and I'm not sure what to think about the fact that Mac unit sales are down again. The Mac has been growing for a long time, and they seem to have reached a plateau. I assume that's the reason why Macs have became absurdly expensive in the last few years -- when they can't grow unit sales, they need to grow revenue per unit.

Well, what do you expect? They keep redesigning the hardware in authoritarian ways: Thou shalt not upgrade the memory yourself (RIP old Mac Pro aluminum tower); Thou shalt not have F and ESC keys; Thou shalt heretofore use USB-C and dongles or will be sent to dongle Hell (I think one of them only has 2); Thou shalt not have feedback on keys. Etc.

And in each of the Commandments there are those who rush to defend: "but I love the new keyboard, I remapped the ESC to Caps, and anyway I love the new garbage can design of the workstation, I prefer soldered memory".

And that the sales numbers speak? Fantastic.

I too wish they would abandon an open standard like USB-C for a cornucopia of proprietary and legacy plugs.

Yeah, that proprietary sdcard technology has no place on the side of a new computer in 2018. Instead, we should use a generic USB-C hole which leads to cable which leads to this sdcard thing.

SD Card is legacy.

Legacy: (noun) a useful, established technology that Apple's designers feel it makes their computers less pretty.

It’s great on paper but rife with problems of its own.

There's enough space to have both. You know, like on 2015 model. Remove Thunderbolt 2 and Magsafe, add TB3/USB-C.

But don't make me look for dongle every time I want to plug in a mouse, USB stick, YubiKey or any other of literary thousands of USB-A devices.

The user experience of this device is objectively worse. It made me think less of Apple - they decided to constantly annoy me to earn more money on dongles.

And those new USB-A devices exist for a reason. There's a formal ban on female USB-C to male USB-A adapters because they're afraid of someone making an A to A cable with two dongles. So if you want to follow the spec, and want to support hosts that don't have a USB-C port, then all you can ship is a USB-A device.

Like any of the USB A male to male cables that you can use to transfer files between to machines, or the USB A female to female adapters you can use with one of these cables to create an extension cable? If they’re banned, I wouldn’t expect them to be as widely sold.

You mean the A to A cables that warn that you may damage your computer if you connect two computers? Or the A to A “cables” that are actually a tiny device that relays data between two computers?

The male to male cable to transfer between machines probably has a device with two slave ports in it. There's EE reasons, as well as protocol reasons why just plugging two hosts into each other is a bad idea (and fixing that was most of the work behind USB OTG).

Female to female is fine, because there shouldn't be a host with a male end that isn't OTG.

And beyond that, there totally exist the banned adapters (C female to A male) but that has more to do with the fact that you can get anything from China, regardless of trademark infringement.

I wish they could do a magsafe/USB-C combo - love both shame they couldnt make a USB-C on either side somehow do magsafe too.

The problem is that there isn't a lot of wiggle room in the USB-C spec to make a compliant plug thats attached magnetically rather than mechanically, and the contacts are recessed rather than surface contacts (so it has to be 'plugged in' rather than 'resting on')

Griffin sells a magnetic USB-C cable - that winds up being a magnetic dongle to a charging cable. Apple doing this would have been considered a hack against their design and would have required them to include a lower quality data-only cable rather than the data+charging USB-C cables they currently include.

Yeah I can see that - too bad Apple has the patent on magsafe so it couldnt be incorporated when USB-C was being designed.

Hm, USB-A and SD aren't proprietary, so I guess you're considering them legacy? SD certainly hasn't been replaced, and I've yet to see a memory stick that isn't USB-A. Ditto for hard drives, though I'm sure they exist.

I understand that thickness perhaps knocked out the USB-A, but the same can't be said for SD. And since the ultra-thin keyboard hasn't worked out that well, then perhaps the MBP is a little too thin for its own good?

An explanation/rebuttal would be more helpful than just downvoting!

On one hand, my xps at work goes through to a dock that uses usb-c/tb3, everything goes through to the dock and nothing except the connector to my laptop. I get why they only had so little usb-c ports. I hope it wasn't as a decision to look "minimal" and thus less practical, meaning they took little is more a bit too literally.

Thing is, to take my work laptop home, I don't want to have to shell out for a dock just to use it at home too so on that hand, I'm happy the xps gives me options to not have to be reliant on a dock, as much as I love the use of a dock at work.

I think the last truly proprietary connector on a Mac was the Apple Display Connector from the G4 Power Mac days.

Magsafe is still on the MacBook Air.

Ah that's right. I guess I've found video adapter dongles more annoying than the proprietary power connector.

Honestly the worst one is the macbook, which is ostensibly the "macbook air with retina display" everyone was dreaming of, has ONE. We're never getting another macbook air, this is the path forward.

There's plenty of space for two, a prototype design with two ports even leaked a few years back

And yet one. It's not like the air even had a cornucopia of ports. It's not like i think it NEEDS them. But seriously, one port for everything?

I would already own one if it had two jacks, but that's just patently ridiculous. One port arguably is barely enough for a phone, much less a full on computer that's expected to be a device host for even just like, a flash drive.

I can only guess the reasons for this weren't the rational engineering-motivated ones.

I picture a meeting of a dozen folks, a powerpoint slide and statistics that show the two models (the four-USB-C version next to this "budget" single-port version). I picture a sort of an argument/pitch/"presentation" that suggests that a high percentage of folks -- consumers (or whatever they are called by marketing people) -- in the "Undecided" camp would lean to the more expensive version. Budgetary swing voters if you will who wouldn't accept a one-port world.

After that I picture some sort of final whitepaper (or whatever it's called), finally approved by someone in jeans who's higher up in the hierarchy of decision-making.

Behold - the Apple Product Lifecycle <tm>

Had one for years. I only ever use the port for power.

The screen is amazing, innards slow and I love it for the purpose I purchased it for.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com