The last time I bought a Mac laptop (in 2010), it cost me $2,499 for the baseline 15".
...and if you bought a Mac in 1984 it would have cost the equivalent of about $10,000 in today's money.
Useful dose of perspective, but its the new prices w.r.t.
last month's prices that matter. Oh, and comparing like-with-like on that timescale is slippery - e.g. should you compare the 2010 15" MBP with nVidia dGPU to the 2016 entry-level rMBP with no dGPU, or the 2015 MacBook Air which probably outperforms it...? My 2011 17" MBP probably cost about US $2700 (I'm guessing - I'm in the UK and and I'm trying not to blame Apple for the drop in the pound) so is it fair to compare it with the $2800 15" rMBP? How about if I throw in the point that although its still a decent machine 6 years later, that's partly thanks to a midlife RAM and HD-to-SSD upgrade which won't be possible on the 2016 model... and since its rocking a 500GB SSD + the original 720GB HD, perhaps I should compare it to the 2016 model with 1TB or 2TB...? Its a piece of string. You've also got to look at the entry level - the base 13" costs considerably more than the Air which it logically replaces.
Trouble is, we've had 35 years of computer prices that, at worst, stayed stable and at best dropped
in numerical terms, in defiance of inflation, while the specs that those prices represented increased exponentially. We're spoiled. That train has hit the buffers - the personal computer is mature technology, year-on-year spec improvements are incremental, sales are dropping because 5-year-old machines are still getting the job done and the last big revolution in performance - SSDs - was way too easy to retrofit to ~2010 models. We're going to start to see inflation - but that doesn't mean that we should quietly accept that unless high-end manufacturers also accept that they can't maintain their windfall profit margins.
Has anyone actually seen a native usb c stick in real life????
Not in use, but they're widely available - mainly the double-ended type that work in both USB-C and USB-A sockets:
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Kingston-D...1478348305&sr=8-3&keywords=usb-c+memory+stick
Are you being obtuse on purpose or just out of habit? People with micro-USB drives already have a mUSB->A cable lying around, so throw in C->A cable and they are all set for the time being.
True - but there's a lot of exaggerated nonsense being talked about "you can't connect an iPhone to a new MacBook Pro" or "so I have to carry around all of these extra adapters" or silly schemes like daisychaining a TB1-to-Ethernet dongle off a TB3-to-TB dongle being proposed. In theory, if you bite the bullet, open your wallet and replace all of your USB-A-to-lightning/microUSB/USB-B cables, miniDP-to-VGA/DVI/HDMI cables, and usb/TB-to-Ethernet dongles with the USB-C equivalent then you won't actually be carrying any more adapters than you do already. And/or switching to a dock for your main desktop will actually be a great improvement for most people if they can be persuaded to try it.
In theory. The flies in the ointment are:
- Thunderbolt 1/2 needing an expensive, active dongle. Complaints on a postcard to Intel, although since all TB1/2 cables are "active" anyway this is hardly surprising. Certainly Apple have done their best here: even before the price drop their TB1/2 dongle was half the price of (& far neater than) the 3rd party ones already available, and I don't think having both TB2 and TB3 ports on a laptop was ever a sane proposition.
- Firewire - after 4-5+ years of warning that Firewire is going away I'm ready to junk my FW kit (and a lot of FW stuff supports USB as well). Of course, I don't have any $$$$ pro Audio/Video kit with firewire. I'd have thought that the march to 4k and beyond would have driven it out of pro video by now. Maybe there are still pro audio folk (who often seem to get the raw end of these deals) out there that need it, though.
- I've got a 27" LED Cinema display at work with a captive MiniDisplayPort/USB-A/Magsafe cable. The MagSafe is just gonna have to go to waste and I can only find one, third party, USB-C to MiniDP adapter. Again, frankly, the moral of this story is don't buy displays with captive cables and/or no additional input connectors (which is why I don't have a Cinema or Thunderbolt display of my own)
- USB2/3 devices with captive cables or in "stick" form. You can have my wired keyboard with numpad when you pry it from beneath my cold, dead hands; I've got a couple of USB stick TV tuners and - while I'd certainly get a USB-C thumbdrive or two - I need to be able to deal with other people's USB sticks. Now, I'd be basically sorted with the AV adaptor(s) that I'd need anyway, but maybe others don't need those.
The latter is why most people people
will need at least one USB-C-to-A dongle rather than cables - and why it would be sensible for Apple to chuck a couple in the box with the Mac (and, as you say, they're also a short term fix).
