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Comment by filereaper | Hacker News Reader

Its absurd that Apple decided adding a direct port for a second monitor needs a "Pro" MacBook.

My sister was given a M2 and had to use external dongles which then needed DisplayLink to be installed.

None of this is necessary.

100%. An SD card slot and a video out port are not pro features. A typical college freshman will need both of those, regardless of their discipline. In fact, my entry level, 13" MacBook Air had those a decade ago.

SD card is kind of niche these days - it's really just for people with a camera and most people just use a phone at this point. HDMI out though is definitely still useful for regular people (presentations, conferences, TV, etc...)

some internet of things stuff like a webcam will write data to an sd card.

Very few people use SD cards these days, with the massive decline in camera usage.

The SD card slot is a pretty good way to get yourself a little more disk space - a perennial problem with students in particular.

There are a couple of companies that make aluminum trays sized to exactly fill the sd card slot on older Macbooks and remain flush (there's a detente for sticking a wire in to pull it out. The tray has wiring for a microSD card. On that machine, I moved my iTunes library there. Since it's read-only, I don't need to worry too much about wear or write IO bandwidth.

> a perennial problem with students in particular.

is it? AFAIK kids these days need less storage than ever before, because everything's cloud based. No one has itunes libraries, its spotify/applemusic subscriptions. etc.

Some stuff like photo or video will eat up your freeish cloud based storage for long. iphone backups into icloud too. then you are into the $120 a year plans for like 2tb of storage even though that can probably buy 4tb of local storage these days. they sell 1tb phones for a reason, people have a lot of files.

Learning to declutter is a life skill. The younger you are the less likely you’ve climbed that mountain.

Nintendo switch or gaming computer might be a more common problem than music collection.

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