I hope they don't bring back USB-A, but the SD card slot and hdmi have been sorely missed. If you do anything with photography, being able to just plug the card directly into your laptop makes a world of difference. Same thing with walking into any meeting and already knowing you'll be able to plug into a projector if needed, without having to run out and grab a dongle.
Every single peripheral I own is USB-A. I've never seen USB-C-only as the default option on any peripheral in a store or Amazon. Not having USB-A on a laptop is just absurd to me.
I agree that it is the standard, but I wish it wasn't. USB-C is preferable in every way.
When the iMac came out, everyone thought it was crazy not to have a serial port on the outside, since that was the standard for mouse and keyboard. But pretty soon, everything was available for USB. In fact, you might not have all those USB-A peripherals if Apple hadn't cut the cord, so to speak.
So I don't mind the loss of USB-A as much because USB-C is a strict upgrade. But for the SD card reader and the HDMI those are sort of separate and common use cases.
Others never use SD and have a USB-C to A dongle permanently plugged in (me). The ideal exact connectors probably differ a lot per person, and at least USB-C+Thunderbolt can support everything.
HDMI is probably the least controversial, although there will also be people who never connect external displays.
> The ideal exact connectors probably differ a lot per person
Agreed. All I really need is more USB-C ports. Both my current MacBook Air and my upcoming MacBook Pro have only two USB-C ports and I don’t understand why they didn’t make them with four USB-C ports.
Its limited by CPU PCI connectors, adding more ports needs a lot more bandwidth, uses more power and needs more pins. The low end models are not expected to have these, but the larger more power hungry ones will.
Agreed. It probably should have occurred to me before, but a lot of the Wacom and Huion drawing tablets with screens use HDMI for display and some kind of USB for input. Obviously that would be better if they were upgraded to thunderbolt models that could do both, but that would of course require another $1000+ upgrade for those users on top of the laptop.
Of course the real question is how much more quickly does thunderbolt get adopted when nobody's Macbooks have HDMI, which is probably one that Apple is asking themselves. They've never shied away from pushing industries forward to accommodate them.
> With respect to HDMI, it's very common in offices and for people speaking at events, but most consumers wouldn't use it much.
Completely false. Most cheaper CONSUMER monitors today come with only two inputs: HDMI and VGA. More expensive ones come with Displayport in addition. All TVs have HDMI ports. What else, aside from monitors and TVs, are consumers connecting their laptops to??
If you do anything with photography, you are carrying around a camera, batteries, and lenses anyway. Just buy a 12$ card reader and put it into your camera bag with all your other expensive stuff.
It surprises me that people who buy high-dollar computers are so reluctant to buy an extra cable. TB3 natively supports DP at faster speeds than HDMI 2.0b can push. You can buy a TB3 to DP1.4 cable online for $15. Even the most expensive cable for this purpose sold on Apple's web store costs $50. I suppose you can ask your office manager to buy a couple for the meeting rooms, in order to accommodate Mac users.
Maybe consider that it’s more nuanced in real life.
That $12 card reader, even expensive USB-3 card readers, are often a lot slower than that builtin one. They get lost and broken, not even considering that when you’re on the go, many photographers will absolutely try to shed as much unnecessary weight as possible, as not many people are built like the hulk or have an entourage of assistants doing the heavy lifting.
I use my laptop a lot outside of an office, and having that multitude of builtin ports is an absolute must, as dongles are quite difficult to deal with in situations when I don’t have a flat surface to put the laptop on. That TB/Ethernet dongle I regularly do have to use has been a great source of frustration.
I bought a new MacBook Air last year, and a USB A/C adapter with it. I somehow lost the adapter. Bought another one. Then bought a dual A/C USB thumb drive. I'm getting along, but would appreciate at least one USB-A port.
I am also a photographer, and miss the SD port. But I realize that's kinda niche, and can understand it going away. I wouldn't be surprised to see cameras move away from SD cards eventually anyway.
The speed of the SD is far more limiting than the speed of the card reader itself, even for USB2.0.
As for whether I consider the nuances of "real life," I traveled by land across several countries with a DSLR, and took hundreds of photos a week. My DSLR has a CF slot and an SD slot; I used the SD slot for a wifi chip, and saved all photos to CF. My CF reader hasn't gotten lost or broken, and I didn't have "an entourage of assistants doing the heavy lifting" (whatever that means when talking about a card reader).
In real life, you can just use an external card reader. It's not a big limitation, just like it's not a big limitation that laptops these days don't have optical drives.
USB 2.0 tops out at a theoretical 60MB/s, and in reality it is much slower, far below the read speeds of fast SD cards.
I appreciate that it’s good enough under some circumstances, but not always. Certainly not when taking several cards worth of photos a day, with only very limited time to do transfer, selection, and editing.
It's not about the cost, it's about UX. If I just did a full day of shooting photos, and I am in the hotel room looking at the photos, I don't want to dig through my bag and pull out the card reader, or to have a dongle hanging off of my laptop when I'm doing it. If I can just get the card out of the camera and throw it in the laptop it's so much nicer
