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Comment by emsy | Hacker News Reader

HDMI makes more sense imo. You can hook up an SD card with adapter, connect the camera via USB-C or wireless. With Displays you aren’t as flexible.

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There is no display that accepts HDMI that would not work with a USB-C -> HDMI adapter. Add in the fact that HDMI is generally inferior to connectors like DisplayPort and you have a wasted slot. I can almost understand the SD card, but the inclusion of HDMI is just a waste of port space.

I'm guessing it's mostly for people connecting to projectors in conference rooms.

Maybe I'm just unlucky, but I've had consistently bad results with USB->HDMI adapters. From not working at all, to random CPU spikes, to my current situation of the external monitor intermittently flashing blue. This is with both Apple and third-party dongles.

the inclusion of HDMI is just a waste of port space

This is Apple; they'd have zero ports if they could get away with it. Clearly they've done research and found that it's important to a significant portion of the target market.

Lots of people use SD cards as basically "permanent" extendable storage. And this is something that's much more necessary on lesser Macbooks because they come with such limited standard storage. A 256GB SD card is under $40, while adding that much storage to the SSD in the Macbook is hundreds.

HDMI is just one of the many display ports around, and the people using it are probably tied to a desk or something, so having a dongle for it is really no big deal.

I don't mind using my Anker for HDMI, but it sucks that I have to use it for SD.

I had a SD for extended storage in my MacBook (until I upgraded the SSD, those were the times), but if we’re being honest this is an issue created by the ridiculous storage prices Apple charges. Otherwise you’d just buy a large enough SSD without bargaining if you’d even need it.

That's part of the problem, but it's also convenient to have a storage card that you can easily move between machines as needed.

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