An extra port is not inconvenient - you just won't use it. A missing port is SUPER inconvenient.
Can't tell you how annoying it is to require a USB-A dongle or adapter, same with HDMI.
Can't tell you how annoying it is to require a USB-A dongle or adapter, same with HDMI.
Very quickly meetings started with question of "who has a laptop with real HDMI/DisplayPort? We would like to start in 15s instead of 15 minutes of fighting with dongles..."
I use such a dongle a lot whenever I am presenting on conferences etc, and have been doing so for many years (even before the all-out for USB-C/Thunderbolt on MacBooks, there were no VGA ports, while many projectors still were; now I see a lot of HDMI, but still need the adaptor).
And I habe yet to have a single issue caused by that! Sure, damaged VGA cables and other weirdness, but never ever anything tracing back to the dongle.
In the same time I helped lots of people who struggled with their laptops with builtin VGA/HDMI Granted, usually not the laptops fault but rather PEBKAC / or people not knowing how to control Windows / Linux. Doesn't really matter: my point is that I see zero correlation between dongle usage and projector troubles.
Yes they are. The singular form of data is datum, not anecdote.
A personal experience is a data point. A 2nd hand story may well be an anecdote. "I have this and use it for that" is very much data in this case.
Is it enough to make product design decisions? No. Should Apple throw it out as an outlier? I would argue no - to think one person is a special snowflake with a unique problem is a mistake too.
Usual case was that with dongles, the display wasn't detected, at all, and having spent quite a bit of time fiddling with it, it didn't seem fixable.
Very quickly meetings started with question of
"who has a laptop with real HDMI/DisplayPort?
We would like to start in 15s instead of 15
minutes of fighting with dongles..."
There are plenty of arguments against against going all-in on USB-C and forcing people to buy/carry multiple dongles. I don't like dongles myself! I still use a (pre-USB C) 2015 MacBook Pro, partially for that reason. I greatly prefer common ports such as HDMI to be built right into the laptop.
But "15 minutes of fighting with dongles?" Even if there's some comic exaggeration here, I don't understand.
Of all my gripes with Mac laptop dongles, "fighting" with them is not on the list. They are as plug and play as it gets. No drivers, etc... I hate carrying them but they're not exactly difficult to use.
The only way I can imagine people "fighting" with dongles is if they were nontechnical users who had difficulties simply plugging a cable in.
I personally strongly suspect that they had a broken batch of dongles, seeing as how trying to use them on other systems often resulted in display detection issues too.
Then there was of course "oh, I forgot the HDMI dongle"/"Someone took the one that was in the meeting room" and so on.
The end result was that it soon become normal for people to push against updating the laptops.
Paraphrasing what I said in another comment, dongles are flaky. If yours aren't, congratulations, but that doesn't mean other people are lying or that they don't know how things work.
But your random non-technical person only faced the fact that the chances of quickly setting up a meeting went down if the presenter needed a dongle.
See what fun we have when we lie and exaggerate.
Many "streamable" options often end up actually using HDMI dongles, if working at all. Or work with very limited set of systems (the weird apparently undocumented reverse-RDP for projectors in Windows, intel-proprietary streaming, etc.)
The quicker we move, the better. It'll be a little painful at first, but then we'll have only USB-C for everything.
We saw the same thing with Flash. Apple didn't like Flash and wanted it dead. They couldn't manage to kill it off through negotiation or outreach or by offering a better alternative, so they instead decided to weaponize the iPhone by refusing to support Flash at all. Their angry customers then killed Flash for them.
Don’t blame Apple for Flash’s demise. Blame Adobe. They allowed it to become the inefficient, security rats nest that it was.
The web is amazingly better now that Flash has been relegated to its best use: historical animations and games.
I thank Apple for Flash's demise. I had no love for Flash. What I blame Apple for is treating their customers as pawns in a game. They sold their customers a broken product so they could gain leverage.
Is it though? All I see is millions of bloated websites that all look the same thanks to lack of Flash, and not much success with html5 to really replace Flash.
It is, by the way, absolutely not a clear advantage to get rid of old ports. USB C is about five years old. It is absolutely ludicrous to claim that any peripheral older than USB C is obsolete. That goes double for audio equipment. I have decades-old equipment that is still excellent by modern standards, but Apple has decided it's got to go because the 3.5mm headphone jack is unfashionable. If I were an Apple customer I would have no choice but to throw out all my electronics every few years or carry around a suitcase of adapters.
None of this was possible prior to those "years of pain." I personally welcome our USB-C overlords.
I have an HDMI monitor connected to my MacBook via a USB-C to HDMI/USB dongle, which also charges the computer, keyboard and trackpad, and another another via a UDB-C to DisplayPort cable.
I've been using my SDcard based camera less and less, both because my phones got much better and because they are much smaller. With an iPhone, which is a pretty decent camera, everything happens transparently and all my photos are automagically imported.
A reasonable docking station/port extender is small and has all those ports. I keep one in my backpack (even though I used it like once while traveling).
I really prefer it this way. I'd also love if Apple went back into making monitors that could charge my Mac and offer plenty of rarely used ports on its back.
I catch my Bride doing her photography workflow on her old, replaced macbook because it has the sdcard handy, she won't mess with the rat's nest in her office, and lord knows where the half a dozen dongles went.
The userbase of all tech products is too big for this to be reasonable now. This attitude was only successful during a time when fewer people overall each owned fewer devices individually. USB-A won and it will be around forever. HDMI won and it will be around forever.
So for the foreseeable future, if you ever do a presentation, and you have a Mac, you are going to bring a dongle.
If you're a teacher and you don't want to deal with an unreliable dongle 5 times a day, the most convenient Mac for you is currently the 2015 Macbook Pro with its built-in HDMI port.
This $30 dongle is cheaper than upgrading all the projectors to support Type-C, and still allows older PCs to use HDMI.
Not really sure what's unreliable about USB-C to HDMI dongles... sure if you buy a crappy one they have issues, but good ones aren't expensive these days (at least, for projector resolution. YMMV if you're trying to do 4k or something)
Here. You don't need a special cable - you need a small adapter: https://www.wish.com/product/5ae06f0a7ddb0672b9a704b9?share=...
USB Type-C receptacle to USB legacy adapters are explicitly not defined or allowed. Such adapters would allow many invalid and potentially unsafe cable connections to be constructed by users.
[1]: https://www.usb.org/sites/default/files/USB%20Type-C%20Spec%...
Video??? The comparison was with HDMI.
Also thanks for missing my main point about USB C...
And this? https://www.cablematters.com/pc-655-123-usb-20-type-c-usb-c-...
You can even have USB-B: https://www.cablematters.com/pc-652-123-usb-20-type-c-usb-c-...
(apologies to dongle teams who basically put custom computers inside cables)
But USB-C's port/cable standards are such a huge mess that there will probably never be a time when you can walk into a random conference room and find a USB-C video plug which 'just works'. The reality is Mac users come into meetings with a dongle hanging off their machine. And maybe Apple finally realized that's not a good look.
But some people live in apartments and some people park their car most of the day at work.
This is a way of saying - not everyone parks their computer at home with a nice reliable setup completely under their control.
Some people - for many reasons - have to use setups that are out of their control. Those people will be second-class citizens, carrying an assortment of duct-tape with them (dongles).
An extra port:
- is e-waste for everyone who never uses it
- reduces the rigidity of the case
- increases costs
- adds weight
- takes up space
- lets in dust and potentially liquid spills
You can see why people who never use them say ‘no thanks’. Isn’t it better that the people who do want them take on the costs of the port via a dongle?
- case rigidity? The 2015 MBP case is fine.
- increases cost? No proof of this at all.
- adds weight? Again, a microscopic amount of weight to the laptop, far offset by the weight of dongles.
- takes up space? There's plenty of space to add this.
- lets in dust and liquid? The keyboard is a far more likely culprit.
But Apple aren't just trying to please you - they're trying to please most people. Most people don't use SD cards or USB-A devices anymore. The few who do can still do it using dongles, but the majority get a better laptop without them.
Maybe Apple changed their mind, yes (it's just a rumour at the moment), but I'm explaining why Apple does it the way they do at the moment. That was their thinking.
And you can't 'contradict' people's opinion on the way things should be done!
Not sure what you mean - the iPhone 11 is Lightning, which is usually plugged into a charger not a laptop. I doubt many people plug their phones into the laptops anymore - syncing has been done over wireless for many years now.
Why would you do that? It's going to be super-slow - I don't believe it supports Fast Charging as the port can't handle the minimum 20 W.
So yes some people will buy a USB C to lightning cable for their older iPhone and a better wall adapter but most people will just use the included charger.
It’s not about syncing at all
If you don’t understand this use case, then I wouldn’t make bold claims that *most* users never use USB A as it’s certainly false
Even within the Apple ecosystem, so many devices exist that use USB-A that I don't think that most people could accept the assertion that "most people don't use USB-A devices" without some kind of proof (like the sort of usability studies Jony Ive must've used for toilet paper at Apple)
But almost all the Android phones are USB-C aren't they?
Other manufacturers' laptops are also often USB-C for charging. And other brands of things like wireless headphones. Apple uses it less than other brands, as they still have Lightning in many places.
I'm sorry for the crude language but that's absolute bullshit.