I understand his concerns, and it seems like everyone has their "why I left macOS" hot-take cocked and loaded these days, but this sort of sounds like "I left macOS and the only thing I miss are the things that makes a laptop useful in 2020."
I understand his concerns, and it seems like everyone has their "why I left macOS" hot-take cocked and loaded these days, but this sort of sounds like "I left macOS and the only thing I miss are the things that makes a laptop useful in 2020."
Anecdata: I don't use wifi on my work computer. Ethernet is faster and more reliable, and since my desk/monitors/mouse/keyboard stay in the same place it's easy to drag another wire over there too.
If you're going to run an OS with bad or lack of wireless support, might as well grab a cheap PC tower.
I think most people today would look at a laptop with bad wifi and wonder what its purpose was.
I just ordered a desktop and was a bit surprised and also relieved to find that it comes with wifi built in.
The idea of a wired network sounds great to me, but the reality is my house isn't set up for one.
When do you 'need it'?
I've now got a requirement for solid bluetooth (5) in every pc I own. I don't "need" it, but I also don't need most of the things that make my life more pleasant.
ah, this so much. I was fine with cheap sony earplugs with cables until i fell for the meme and bought a pair bluetooth sony headphones.
That's a gamechanger, really.
One important thing to be aware of: because of their size, you can only fit a single battery cell inside each bud; as I understand it, this prevents any ability to specially manage the lifetime of the battery. I remember hearing something like “expect about 380 full recharges until the battery is no good.”
Anyway. Switching between devices is so seamlessly awesome. “Transparency” mode works well and is easy to switch in and out of. They do a great job of detecting if you just pulled them out of your ear and manage stop/start. Combined with a cellular Apple Watch, it totally rocks, giving you complete communications hook-in and letting you keep your phone at home. I assume they make you buy the phone not only because it’s technically easier to implement the full experience, but also because the Watch would totally cannibalize iPhone sales. The iPhone suddenly feels like a niche device when you have the AirPod/Watch combo.
My primary complaint with the AirPod Pros is that no matter which size insert I use or how tightly I secure them, they tend to fall out of my ears when I smile. I wish you could get them in the “peg” form-factor.
This has been my mini-review.
Counter-Anecdata: I currently couldn't use my laptop for work without wifi.
I recently moved and my current place has no suitable desk (or chair) near to the internet gateway.
If I had no wifi I could as well have a brick instead of a laptop.
If I had poor wifi (eg: freebsd not supporting wifi-ac) work would be a torture and video-conferencing with colleagues would be unusable.
So IME it's not really a big deal.
Until you need that USB port back...
I've since switched away from Mac hardware and don't have this problem anymore, along with a myriad of other problems that Apple created for me (I can actually upgrade my RAM to be >16 GB, I don't need to carry around a bag of dongles, etc.).
You throw one of those little "7 in 1" USB-C hubs in your bag. That's it. That's all you need.
Not sure why you would consider that to be disingenuous, I'm merely sharing my personal experience.
And it's just not been the case for me with the recent MacBook Pros. Like your experience, with past laptops I've used I've always had to carry around different adapters, regardless of whether the machine was Windows or Mac. No matter how many ports the vendor tries to shoe-horn into the laptop, they can never quite get them all in there, and so you end up with a dongle or series of dongles.
With the MacBook implementation of USB-C, I carry one small USB-C hub that gives me pretty much everything from ethernet to microSD. The infamous "dongle book pro" actually has made my life less dongle-y.
And that's where I see the whole "bag of dongles" as a disingenuous line of attack from people who don't actually use the machines for their real lives. In practice, it's the least dongle-y laptop I've ever used.
(thanks for coming to my ted talk)
As I use a laptop for my main machine, I don’t use any Bluetooth devices with it and I connect it to a thunderbolt dock with Ethernet. The Lenovo one. I find wired devices more reliable and wireless devices more expensive, heavier and usually slower. I love my little Apple pen and ear pods for my phone and tablet though. It’s just a different "workflow".
Why this obsession with Wifi? If I can I always use a wired connection. It's faster, more reliable and removes a major failure mode.
If wireless is so awesome, how come WIFI routers have wires inside them!
I'm only being a little hyperbolic here--there are a lot of reasons people prefer or even require WiFi.
If I have gigabit ethernet at every place I use a computer, then sure, I'm not saying no. But even in a work from home environment where I have a little more control, it's not always an option.
I also prefer wires, because they're duplex and not shared, as well as the reliability issues with radio transmission/reception.
But yes, I also use Wi-Fi when wires are infeasible. It's better than nothing, if I need internet.
Sometimes, yes.
We had a once in a century ice storm a few years ago. We were without power for four days during in the winter.
They re-established power gradually and I still remember the crowds at Starbucks. It was all people waiting to use the outlets to recharge their phones.
Meanwhile, while the power was out and we had no heat, my wall phone worked fine throughout.
You know that they have an independent power supply, and if you don't use a cordless handset, they work fine even with the electricity out.
I also have the last version of the phone book that was printed in my city, and I was making calls all week and finding people and resources to help me deal with the emergency.
Doesn't everybody already know that networking performance has greatly increased over the decades?
But if you were on 10base2, you had to ensure that you had your 50Ohm terminators.