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Yes, they should totally bring back the firewire port!
I’m no Apple fanboy (never owned a product of theirs and never will) but to be fair, those two USB-C ports can do everything the old, removed ports can do and more. The real crime here is not putting enough of them on the laptop.
Edit: The only port I’ll lament the removal of is the headphone jack. USB-C headphones are rare, adapters get lost, and bluetooth headphones compress the audio and have input lag. Everything else can go, though, and won’t be missed. (Okay fine ethernet can stay too.)
The sd card reader is cool too
For some yes, for some not.
My ideal minimum is this: 3x USB-C with support for slow 5V charging, 3x USB-A, 1x RJ-45 Ethernet (not some shit like ThinkPad Ethernet extension), 1x HDMI or 1x DP++, 1x DB9 serial port, 1x MicroSD or 1x SD slot (flush when inserted), 1x 3.5mm combo jack.
to be fair, those two USB-C ports can do everything the old, removed ports can do and more
To connect to a device that’s 100 meters away at an appreciable speed (and beyond that at lesser quality), one still kind of needs Ethernet. Can be accomplished with an adapter, though.
Did you read my edit?
Nope, I think I must have written my reply while it hadn’t propagated here.
They remove the extra ports because they take up space in the board.
That aside if you’re buying Mac you took it from yourself. No one made you buy it.
And look how much thinner. A large part of that is the need for physical ports which although they may loom small on the outside, also take up space inside for the boards that convert signals. Now those conversions happen in the dongles if needed.
The real problem is that USB didn’t implement a hub standard so most hubs have had to use old hub standards and just have a single USB-C connector and the rest USB-A, hdmi, etc. There haven’t been many purely USB-C to USB-C hubs to allow for connecting lots of USB-C devices to a single port and usually they end up losing features or splitting bandwidth instead of sharing the full bandwidth.
Just one port to rule them all
Not Lenovo, my ThinkPad P1 has lots of nice ports
This pic leaves out the latest generation of MacBook that brings back some of those ports.
I guess OP would rather generate outrage upvotes, rather than spread the truth.
I dont know why this is controversial. I’m way more happy with 4x USB-C, than 5 unique ports, that will likely never be used on a regular basis, even when they were relevant
4 USBC would be cool. Most of these devices only have 2 or 3, minus 1 required for power delivery. If you have peripherals a hub is almost required.
Content note: shilling
Just had a look at the prices, I can get 128 GB of RAM for the price that Apple charge for 16 GB of RAM.
I’m tempted to get 128 GB of RAM just because, I definitely don’t need it.
I do have 4, but except for extremely rare circumstances I only ever use one. A single USBC cable handles an external display, power, plus extra accessories like a keyboard via a built-in hub in the monitor. If you wanted to that monitor also supports daisy chaining another monitor without having to plug it into the laptop.
Obviously it’s quite a subjective thing, but if you happen to use tools from after USBC was a thing and your laptop routine is pretty established, I think you can get a ton of simplicity and function out of those ports.
You like a little baggy of dongles and adapters?
To make our laptops look clean and minimalistic, they made us buy a bunch of dongles and adapters.
Screw it, I’m buying a rugged laptop with the thickness of a desktop PC next
Get a Framework
USB-C does a lot of heavy lifting. Also, MagSafe™ is still there. A little surprised there is also a SD card slot. And a HDMI port. Not complaining about their inclusion, and I do use them regularly, but why did the dongle company give these to us?
A lot of people give presentations or connect their laptop to a TV, I don’t think taking out the HDMI port would go down well at all.
MagSafe™ is still there.
depends on the laptop. macbook air is the costco best seller proletariat mac, and as of a year ago when I bought mine, it just has 2 usb-c on one side and an audio jack on the other. USB-c power is a deep set connection not magsafe. I miss magsafe.
I’m pretty happy with a usb-c port multiplier doing all the work. Who wants to carry around all those accessories?
- When I want to be portable, all I need is my laptop.
- when I sit at my desk, one connection gets me power, monitor, Ethernet, keyboard, mouse, headphones, and lots of empty ports
because people kept asking for them back! i never use those ports though, and would really really love to have a full size USB port instead of HDMI i would never ever use. so many accessories still have usb-a adapters only
Funny you say this. I’ve been screaming at my usb c to mini display port adapter for the last hour or so. getting the idisplay or what they are called to work on my work laptop is just agony, because the adapter is so old and doesn‘t work properly anymore and the thing doesn’t offer any other connection methods…
I’m on the other side wishing peripherals would catch up and all become USB-C already. I’m tired of USB-A.
Dude, those two little UBS-C ports do 50x what the ports on the bottom laptop could do
That’s true and good, but I still want to be able to plug on an HDMI or Ethernet cable without a damn adapter.
The laptop may actually be too thin for either. Want those ports? Vote with your money, buy a different laptop.
As for hdmi at least, you can get a usb-c-ended cable too.
Look at that top picture again. It’s not thinner. Look how much of a taper it has to make you think its thinner.
Looking at the bottom one, the back of the screen has gotten thinner compared to the others, but the bottom has barely changed. They lie to you, port thickness has zero bearing on how thin the laptops are, its all lies
“Extremely thin” is pretty low on my list of features I want.
If making it a bit thicker gives me ethernet and HDMI then make it thicker. A laptop moves from place to place, and not needing dongles / specialist cables makes it far easier to jump on anybodies desk and just plug in.
Thankfully USB-C can handle both of those protocols. Just like with Micro USB and Mini before it, it will just take time until the ecosystem catches up. Just, this time, you can run the entirety of possible data streams through a single port.
I don’t wanna wait until the system catches up I need to hook up my laptop to the projector now, and all the cables are hdmi
You can get USB-C to HDMI cables, you don’t need an adapter.
I know it can because I’ve got that exact setup on my work laptop but in order to actually be able to make use of it I need a dongle to use as a breakout and actually give me an HDMI port. As I only have an HDMI to HDMI cable. If it came with a USBC to HDMI cable then that would be acceptable, but they don’t ever come with them.
But only twice. You know the problem with having a network port on a usb is that the laptop no longer has a unique mac address, which can cause problems with authentication in a corporate environment. So when building devices or using mac auth it can be a nightmare.
MAC is useless as a component of the security check. It’s trivial to change; either with a dongle, as you said, or in the network configuration of every major and minor OS.
But if i am authenticating a unique third party laptop i could use the mac address and apply a profile in clearpass to authenticate it and apply an ACL to lock the device down as a separate measure to creating a separate vlan for the device.
I wouldn’t have called it useless in that regard. But im fairly new to network administration, so perhaps i am not well versed enough to know better.
Our clearpass servers struggle sometimes, and i experience timeouts or rejections when a laptop moves from one usb c docking station to another if they fail dot1x and revert to mab.
Also all of this aside, the fact that all the ports got removed from a laptop and now you have to plig in a £60-100 dock to get all those ports back is an absolute con.
I just wish they would give us more than two ports, one of them is the power port anyway so technically they’re only giving you one port, which I think is about three ports too few.
For those in particular, they had 2 and 4 TBT3 models.
$$$$$$$$$
I prefer if USB-C to whatever cables become a standard. That way I can get a cheap cable and plug it into whatever.
I’m okay with USB-C and a headphone jack on my laptop. The other shit is for the birds.
I’m glad I can plug in one port and have a dual display setup, all peripherals, speakers, ethernet, charging, etc connected at my desk in one go.
If I want to leave, unplug one thing and I’m good to go.
Outside the Apple world, a dock connector has been the norm way before USB C was invented.
Fuck firewire. Glad it’s dead. USB C is the best thing to happen to peripherals since the mouse.
USB C is the best thing to happen to peripherals since the mouse.
I would agree with you if there were a simple way to tell what the USB-C cable I have in my hand can be used for without knowing beforehand. Otherwise, for example, I don’t know whether the USB-C cable will charge my device or not. There should have been a simple way to label them for usage that was baked into the standard. As it is, the concept is terrific, but the execution can be extremely frustrating.
Buying a basic, no-frills USB-C cable from a reputable tech manufacturer all but guarantees that it’ll work for essentially any purpose. Of course the shoddy pack-in cables included with a cheap device purchase won’t work well.
I replaced every USB-C-to-C or -A-to-C cable and brick in my house and carry bag with a very low cost Anker cable (except the ones that came with my Google products, those are fine), and now anything charges on any cable.
You wouldn’t say that a razor sucked just because the cheap replacement blades you bought at the dollar store nicked your face, or that a pan was too confusing because the dog food you cooked in it didn’t taste good. So too it is not the fault of USB-C that poorly manufactured charging bricks and cables exist. The standard still works; in fact, it works so well that unethical companies are flooding the market with crap.
Hey that’s a fair point. Funny how often good ideas are kneecapped by crap executions.
Burn all the USBC cables with fire except PD. The top PD cable does everything the lower cable does.
There are many PD cables that are bad for doing data.
Correct. The other commenter is giving bad advice.
Both power delivery and bandwidth are backwards compatible, but they are independent specifications on USB-C cables. You can even get PD capable USB-C cables that don’t transmit data at all.
Also, that’s not true for Thunderbolt cables. Each of the 5 versions have specific data and power delivery minimum and maximum specifications.
IDK I’ve had PD cables that looked good for a while but turns out their data rate was basically USB2. It seems no matter what rule of thumb I try there are always weird caveats.
No, I’m not bitter, why would you ask that?
You forgot thunderbolt and usb4 exists now
You forgot thunderbolt and usb4 exists now
You can buy a single cable that does 40GB and USB4 and charges at 240w.
Do not all USB C cables have the capability to do Power Delivery? I thought it was up to the port you plugged it in to support it?
Nope. My daughter is notorious for mixing up cables when they come out of the brick. Some charge her tablet, some are for data transfer, some charge other devices but not her tablet. It’s super confusing. I had to start labeling them for her.
Come to think of it, all the USB C cables I have are from phone and device chargers so I just took it for granted. Good to know. Thanks for sharing some knowledge with me
USB-c cables can vary drastically. Power delivery alone ranges from less than 1 amp at 5 volts to over 5 amps at 20 volts. That’s 5 watts of power on the low end to 100 watts of power on the high end and sometimes more. When a cable meant to run at 5 watts has over 100 watts of power run through, the wires get really hot and could catch fire. The charger typically needs to talk to a very small chip in the high power cables for the cables to say, yes I can handle the power. Really cheap chargers might just push that power out regardless. So while the USB-c form factor is the one plug to rule them all, the actual execution is a fucking mess.
Yeah, I totally get that there is a need for cheap power only cables, but why are there what feels like 30 different data “standards”. Just gimme power-only, data, and fast-data. And yeah, in 2 years there’ll be a faster data protocol, so what, that’s then fast-data24, fast-data26, etc. and manufacturers have to use a specific pictogram to label them according to the highest standard they fulfill.
Agreed. They should be labeled with the rating.
This little guy works wonders for me.
Oh very cool! And you can’t beat that price. Thanks.
No problem! Oh, and use a charger/power supply for the input. It’ll work on a computer port, but I wouldn’t recommend it.
Yeah, I wouldn’t trust it on a computer port. I’d just plug it into a power brick.
I agree with USB-C, but there are still a million USB-A devices I need to use, and I can’t be bothered to buy adapters for all of them. And a USB hub is annoying.
Plus, having 1-2 USB-C ports only is never gonna be enough. If they are serious about it, why not have 5?
Yeah, I’d love at least one USB A type cause most of the peripherals I own use that.
It really is for me. Those things stick out way too far and might work alright in stationary mode, but while on the go they break easily (speaking from experience) and slip out all the time.
What does ‘anti-top shell design’ mean?
An anti-top-shell design is aimed at preventing the accumulation of debris on the top surface
I bought some adaptors in China for around $0.50 each. It really isn’t that big of a deal
It really is a big deal for me, they stick out too far and are making the whole setup flimsy.
You can’t buy a UCB-C Wifi dongle that last time I checked. You have to buy a c-to-a adapter, then use a usb-a wifi dongle. It’s nuts that those don’t exist.
Genuine question - what device do you have that has USB-C ports, no USB-A ports, doesn’t have WiFi, but supports the dongle?
Pinetab2 shipped with a wifi chip without any Linux drivers. The drivers eventually got made, but before that, you needed a USB dongle with Ethernet or a adapter.
I would also like a USB-c wifi dongle for tech support reasons. Sometimes, the wifi hardware fails and you need a quick replacement to figure out what happened.
