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thedba said:

<Snip>So the dongle hell that ignorant pundits have been peddling is .... a NON ISSUE.

Or not... I have bought a VGA dongle not to use back at base but when out and about. The simple truth, in my world in the UK at least, is that almost all projectors can do VGA and very few can do anything digital, let alone have a USB-C connector. I also need a USB-A connector (helpfully on the same dongle) since few people yet have memory sticks with anything but USB-A plugs.

I agree that this device is useful to some, I just don't see it as portable. I agree that USB-C is the future (I wouldn't have bought the MBP if not). But we have to live in the present so I continue to believe that Apple should have included at least a USB-A dongle in the box so that the MBP is useful straight our of the box (iPhone 7, headphone dongle, why isn't that an equivalent case?).

rune66 said:

It's kind of absurd that all the work Apple has put into creating a completely silent laptop is chrushed by this terrible and extremely noisy keyboard. 

I disagree, it's not actually that noisy. Having used my machine for a few days now, I very much like it: the key response is positive and the click adds to that. I find myself making less mistakes than with the older, longer travel, keys; this one has such a well-defined start-of-travel/click/end-of-travel. The track pad is also excellent, the response is equally good; I think the new keyboard is somehow more consistent with that.

Once you get over the fact that USB-C is still very new, so you're going to have to buy dongles for all your existing peripherals, the machine is good. It looks the business (as it should for its price) and it's usefully lighter. The upside of losing the illuminated Apple logo is that you also lose the plastic insert in favour of a polished metal one - very classy. It's also fast: I have the 2.7GHz i7 and that's no slouch but the real speed is in overall system operation, born, I think, of the very fast SSD. In the real world, apps launch fast, run fast and save fast - the stuff that's hard to understand from benchmarks.

And for Appex, the LG Ultrafine 4K is about the same level of glossy as the MBP's own display. I thought the MBP's display was good until I plugged in the LG: it's a lovely display and I'm already seeing much more quality in my own photos (in Lightroom). I look forward to seeing an objective test of it but I'm subjectively impressed.

Um ... convictions ... credit card fraud ... who're the good guys here? Perhaps the first thing to say should be 'well done' to the Metropolitan Police for smart thinking as they made a lawful arrest of a villain.

Could be our credit cards next.

I wonder about Apple's router sales. At first sight, it's a good product for Apple: almost all of its products have WiFi and it's an important feature. You'd expect a lot of synergy between the expertise required there and that needed to produce routers. Producing your own router also allows for optimisation of particular features, relevant to Apple as it produces its own WiFi services that it wants to see working well (e.g. Airplay).

However, in the UK, every customer for a Broadband connection is given (well, gets no discount for not accepting) a WiFi router. Leaving aside the cognoscenti, like many of the readers here, how many of those people will pay to replace or supplement their 'free' device? It may be that sales have been sufficiently small to render the whole thing unattractive. It's clear that Apple's engineering resources are stretched so a pool of experienced engineers ready to redeploy might be more attractive.

As to monitors, that keep being mentioned in the same context, what's in it for Apple? A monitor is essentially a high-value display screen in a box, with very little opportunity for value adding (hence speakers that few people want, a very-standard hub, another camera to supplement the iSight in every Mac etc). So its all about the display ... that Apple buys-in from an expert. So why not partner with someone like LG to get a minor variant for Apple devices and let customers benefit from cutting out the middle-man?

ericthehalfbee said:

Its a reliability thing more than performance. With a socketed SSD you have three possible failure points: the solder connections on the motherboard to attach the socket,  the solder connections between the SSD chips and the board they are attached to and the socket terminals themselves. Soldering the SSD chips directly to the motherboard eliminates two of these.

Then there's the freedom Apple gets in how the SSD chips are mounted. They may be able to extract additional performance based on routing of the signal lines and their proximity to the processor/bridge. There's also cooling to consider. Mounting directly to the motherboard would cool better than a separate board that's plugged into a socket. And based on tests of similar SSDs (the M.2 form factor that's becoming popular on desktops) that all show thermal throttling, then any extra coooling you can provide is important. 

So multiple benefits with only a single drawback (user repair ability). I'm sure Apple knows the predicted failure rate for their SSDs and how often they would need to replace an entire motherboard for a failed SSD. And based on this they made an engineering decision to solder the SSD.

I think the negativity surrounding the new MBP is getting hysterical. Anyone who has worked around mobile kit will tell you how the hardware designers view sockets (think vibration testing) and ericthehalfbee has summarised it well above.

So Apple designed its mobile computer with an improvement that does have a downside (it's hard to extract the data from a broken unit) - so they fixed the downside. That's a Good Thing for which they deserve praise (it sure beats an after-the-event lecture on the importance of back-ups).

Is it a security risk? Well, it's exactly the same risk as you run if the drive is removable, except in this case the equipment then needed to read the data will be less common. And no, it won't compromise any disk encryption differently either. If the bits are encrypted then the bits are encrypted. You need the key, just like when the SSD was socketed.