elijahg

auxio said:

sirlance99 said:

netrox said:

HDMI should have never been put there. 

Everyone I know uses one when connecting to a tv for a presentation. All the pros are happy about this. In fact, show me one legitimate pro who says Apple should never have a HDMI and or SD card. 

Funny enough, I'd argue against having the SD card slot.  Perhaps it's common for pro photography, but I personally prefer using USB drives (as do most people I know) since they tend to be more durable.  Not to mention that a lot of cameras can be hooked up via USB.

Cameras are almost exclusively USB 2.0. Direct copies from the SD card is way quicker, and you don't need a cable.

aderutter said:

elijahg said:

Glad the ports many here declared "legacy" are back. Are they still "legacy" now?

Yes, I’d rather have an extra Thunderbolt port instead of a HDMI & an SD Card slot.

You need 4 thunderbolt ports and can't daisychain anything? Wow you must be in a tiny minority of minorities. Happily though for a much bigger proportion of MBP users who don't need 4 TB ports and instead need to plug in their SD card and a HDMI display, Apple delivered. You've swapped places with the bigger proportion of users who needed to carry a dongle or two with them everywhere. So as you no doubt told those who lamented the removal of SD and HDMI, you'll have to put up with it as you're the one with a minority use case - not them.

AppleZulu said:

USB-A is not going to return to MacBooks. A USB-A port is a built-in throttling mechanism. Using a dongle to connect a USB-A device to a USB-C port loses nothing, except the minor inconvenience of the dongle. Using a dongle to connect a USB-C device to a USB-A port loses speed, functionality and power, plus you have to have a dongle. On top of that, the Chasis for either MacBook Pro or Air would need an ugly structural bump added to accommodate the larger hole for USB-A. They'll put ugly bumps on iPhones to accommodate new camera tech, but I doubt they'll do that to bring back a legacy port.

The only "throttling" with USB-A is if someone uses a 20gbps device with it. USB-A supports up to 10gbps which is plenty fast enough for all but the most demanding applications. Only the more expensive SSDs can saturate 10gbps.

Fred257 said:

? I know three engineers who work for Intel, one of them complained to me for years that the only solution was adding more capacitors which adds more heat.  All of this was true but Apples approach wins out because the engineers I talked to at Intel didn’t see a way forward and now the CEO knows today that they’re going to be destroyed by these new chips, obliterated is a more correct term to use…

Of course you do. There are no capacitors in CPU (cores) for a start, and if you meant transistors you'll find that Apple's M1 has ~16bn transistors, twice as many as the 24-core Xeon 8180. That's ballooned from 3.3bn in the A10.

Adding transistors doesn't necessarily = more heat, because they're not all constantly switching - which is the only time they are dissipating heat. Application specific silicon can reduce the heat produced but increase the transistor count because there are less total transistor flips for a particular piece of code to execute: it's more efficient. And as above, if that silicon is idle it's not using power. 

Intel CPUs are so inefficient because they are essentially a CISC interpreter ontop of a RISC CPU. Plus due to backward compatibility, there are thousands of SIMD extensions that are used by barely anything but can't be removed due to the few customers that do need them.

command_f said:

I bought the first MBP with a Touch Bar shortly after it was released. I assumed that Apple had a cunning plan for the Touch Bar that would more than compensate for its disadvantages - turned out that they didn't. Touch ID, on the other hand, is really valuable.

Unfortunately as of late it seems buying Apple gear in anticipation of the cool software things they could do with the various new hardware features is not a good plan. Force touch had such a bad software implementation apparently no one used it, the UWB chip is only used if you lose something, the LiDAR sensor only really makes the measure app a bit more reliable (granted it allows third party apps to 3D scan things, but I can't imagine that's too popular a feature?), the touch bar wasn't used for anything much past the original concept and the HomePod ended up gaining very little over time. Obviously Apple has no obligation whatsoever to add more software features than what the device comes with, but for me at least, the anticipation of significant future software updates is a fairly big factor in the value of the device - and helps make the high price easier to swallow.

Completely agree with you on the dongle front too - needing to take a bagful of dongles along with your ultra thin Mac reduces the appeal somewhat. Forcing people to use USB-C won't speed up the rest of the market's transition by a measurable amount. Contrary to Apple's belief, many people do need to interact with the majority of the world's non-Apple computers and devices that are not 100% designed for Macs.