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But what do you use SD for? Cameras presumably? The replacement for SD is wireless. The problem is you're updating your computer to the latest and greatest but not your peripherals and so no it's not compatible. Tech changes.

Please, stop embarrassing yourself! Sometimes i can’t believe the rubbish i am reading here. Get out of mom‘s basement, get a job, feed wife and kids and use actual products. Then come back.
 
Reality: Mac sales down due to lack of worthy updates and high prices, when customers are dying and waiting for a real refresh to spend their money.
Apple's distorted reality: "People aren't buying as many Macs as they used to, let's discontinue some Mac products."
 
This is great news, maybe they'll make a Mac, iMac, MacBook etc that is worth a damn. Still using my 2014 Macbook pro and 2015 iMac 5K. Spent a few dollars upgrading both SSDs and they work great and they have a ton of ports, not just USB C... I'm sure someone will defend the use of a single port and 50 dongles.
 
Every time I read all the complaining from die hard Apple loyalists about how trash their favourite company's hardware is, I think of my Hackintosh and chuckle.

:)
Every time I remember that entire forums exist for fixing Hackintosh problems, and that they're so childish that they're actively censoring each other over BS "stolen software" claims, I'm glad I have my old Mac Pro.
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It’s only one tap dude! Tap on the volume control and then slide your finger up or down to change volume. One quick gesture including only one tap. Same with brightness! Love it. I don’t get all the hate, really like the touchbar and have no problems hitting the keys (although I would appreciate Taptic Engine).
Wasn't aware you could hold your finger. Thanks for the tip. It almost seems like a bug; the thing lags, then you end up sliding your finger not actually on the slider. In any case, it's much more cumbersome than up/down buttons, especially when you want to change it in small increments.
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But what do you use SD for? Cameras presumably? The replacement for SD is wireless. The problem is you're updating your computer to the latest and greatest but not your peripherals and so no it's not compatible. Tech changes.

But if your country is limiting that's a genuine issue, although I can understand if it's not one Apple wants to cater to.

But still... I'm not sure you told me what you're actually using HDMI for exactly? What are you trying to connect to that requires HDMI and can't accommodate anything else?
Wireless with cameras is more pain than gain. SD is still the best. You can use an adaptor. One thing you can't replace is the ability to stick an SD card in that sits flush, allowing you to semi-permanently upgrade the storage on your MBP, but few do that (but I do).

HDMI: Every TV has HDMI and nothing equivalent.

I'm lucky my workplace has all the adaptors in one place, and everyone shares them. As a personal laptop this thing would be annoying and expensive to deal with.
 
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Apple's worldwide Mac shipments were down in the third quarter of 2018, according to new preliminary PC shipping estimates shared this afternoon by Gartner.

During the quarter, Apple shipped an estimated 4.9 million Macs, compared to 5.4 million in the third quarter of 2017 for an 8.5 percent drop. Apple's market share also declined, dropping from 8 percent in 3Q17 to 7.3 percent in 3Q18.

gartner_3Q18_global.jpg

Gartner's Preliminary Worldwide PC Vendor Unit Shipment Estimates for 3Q18 (Thousands of Units)
Apple continues to be the number four PC vendor in the world, ranking below Lenovo, HP, and Dell, but above Acer and Asus. Lenovo was the number one vendor during the quarter, shipping an estimated 15.8 million PCs for 23.6 percent market share.

HP came in second with 14.6 million PCs shipped for 21.8 percent market share, while Dell was third with 10.7 million PCs shipped and 16 percent market share. Acer and Asus both shipped around 4 million PCs for 6.1 and 6 percent market share, respectively.

gartner_3Q18_trend.jpg

Apple's Market Share Trend: 1Q06-3Q18 (Gartner)
Apple's decline in Mac sales is no surprise as the company has yet to update much of its Mac lineup for 2018. The only Mac that has seen a refresh so far is the MacBook Pro, with MacBook, MacBook Air, and Mac mini updates still on the horizon for a fall launch.

Falling Mac sales come amid stagnant growth for the overall worldwide PC market. A total of 67.2 million PCs were shipped during the quarter, an 0.1 percent increase from the third quarter of 2017.

Apple also saw a decrease in Mac shipments in the United States during 3Q18. Apple shipped a total of 2 million Macs during the quarter, down from 2.2 million in 3Q17, for a 7.6 percent drop in growth and 13.7 percent market share.

gartner_3Q18_us.jpg

Gartner's Preliminary U.S. PC Vendor Unit Shipment Estimates for 3Q18 (Thousands of Units)
HP was the number one PC vendor in the United States, shipping 4.5 million PCs for 30.7 percent market share. Dell came in at number two with 3.8 million PCs shipped and 25.9 percent market share, while Lenovo was third with 2.3 million PCs shipped and 15.4 percent market share.

IDC also released its own shipment estimates this afternoon, noting a similar decline in sales for Apple. According to IDC, Apple shipped 4.8 million Macs during the quarter, down from the aforementioned 5.4 million, a decline of 11.6 percent.

In IDC's rankings, Apple falls below Lenovo, HP, Dell, and Acer, coming in as the number five worldwide PC vendor. IDC's data also suggests an overall worldwide PC market decline of 0.9 percent rather than the 0.1 percent growth noted by Gartner.

Apple could see its Mac shipments jump back up during the fourth quarter of 2018 and the first quarter of 2019 as there are multiple Mac updates that we're expecting towards the end of the year, perhaps as early as October.

It's important to note that data from Gartner and IDC is preliminary and the numbers can shift, sometimes dramatically and sometimes less so. Last year, for example, Gartner said that Apple shipped 4.6 million Macs worldwide during the third quarter of 2017 when the actual number was significantly higher at 5.4 million.

Article Link: Apple's Mac Sales Down in Q3 2018 Amid a Lack of Updates
Didn’t know Lenovo was such a top dog
 
This is great news, maybe they'll make a Mac, iMac, MacBook etc that is worth a damn. Still using my 2014 Macbook pro and 2015 iMac 5K. Spent a few dollars upgrading both SSDs and they work great and they have a ton of ports, not just USB C... I'm sure someone will defend the use of a single port and 50 dongles.
The 2014/2015 MBP are fine machines, but some Pros need what only Thunderbolt 3 can provide, like high performance eGPUs, single/dual 5K monitors, etc. And while few need capabilities like 40Gb Ethernet, external hardware RAID, SAS or fiber channel adapters and the like, those are available.

With 6C/12T processors and 32GB of RAM, the current MBP offers quite a jump in overall horsepower over earlier machines. They are especially appreciated by those whose workload involves a fair amount of VMs, or other use cases constrained by cores and/or RAM.
 
One thing you can't replace is the ability to stick an SD card in that sits flush, allowing you to semi-permanently upgrade the storage on your MBP, but few do that (but I do).

You got the jetdrive light? I've got one too which I put a bunch of movies I "acquired" back in the day on so I could play them places getting to my plex is impractical. I havent "acquired" any media that way in years though so both the jetdrive and plex are unused. Jetdrive does a fine job keeping fluff out of the sd slot though :)
 
I'll say it again. All Apple has to do is give the MBA a routine processor update and replace the current TN display with an IPS display......does not have to be retina......just better viewing angles with decent resolution. How difficult could that be? Don't mess around with anything else. They would sell these like crazy for the next two years, until they get their act together with the rest of the line-up.
 
Please, stop embarrassing yourself! Sometimes i can’t believe the rubbish i am reading here. Get out of mom‘s basement, get a job, feed wife and kids and use actual products. Then come back.

The “Ignore” feature is invaluable.
 
You got the jetdrive light? I've got one too which I put a bunch of movies I "acquired" back in the day on so I could play them places getting to my plex is impractical. I havent "acquired" any media that way in years though so both the jetdrive and plex are unused. Jetdrive does a fine job keeping fluff out of the sd slot though :)
No, I bought a microSD card adaptor on Amazon that's designed to fit in, with even a metal edge to make it unnoticeable, then I put a 128GiB microSD card into it. But I had to make two attempts. First adaptor I bought was junk and didn't work.
 
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No, I bought a microSD card adaptor on Amazon that's designed to fit in, with even a metal edge to make it unnoticeable, then I put a 128GiB microSD card into it. But I had to make two attempts. First one I bought was junk and didn't work.

Maybe I should have gone that route. Jetdrive is crazy slow, even for SD. Still, there is a chance that it will one day rescue me from boredom when offline.
 
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My solution has pretty fast reads, but the writes are slower. It's good enough for media, not good enough to run big apps off of.

Fits the requirement then, which is what’s important. Honestly, I can’t say I’ll miss it much when I finally upgrade from the 2015 but I also recognize that a) my use is not everyone’s use case and that b) it is, undeniably, a loss of a feature.
 
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Well, guess you misunderstood my post and missed my point. It wasn't about upgrading, it's about repair. Reading comprehension would help you debate better. But at least you got some misaligned info tossed in there. And speaking of "someone who speaks with such authority", you did well yourself.....Nice job.

Actually I don't believe I mentioned "upgrading" in my post at all. I know you were talking about repair.

The repair process for an Apple device is take it to Apple or an authorized repair center (yes, acknowledged Apple Stores aren't everywhere but authorized repair centers are) and they fix it. And if you buy it with AppleCare (as you're insane not to do) then they fix it for free for three years.

So back to your post I responded to: Why do you want to buy parts off eBay to repair it when Apple will do so for free? What parts are we talking about?
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Why do we need HDMI? Apparently you live in a bubble and never have to do anything with your computer outside your own fantasy world you live in.

Actually full size DP would be better.

Those of us who work in the live event world; Apple has done everything in their power to make it less and less likely for us to use their products.

The current MacBook Pro should have either 2 HDMI ports or 2 full size DP ports. If Apple really wanted a game changer they would put 12G mini-BNC outputs for the GPUs on the machines.

The only bubble I live in is the one created by people who won't give me a straight answer. They keep telling me their computers need all these different ports but no one tells me what devices they're trying to connect their Macs to with the se ports.

Even you, just now, said "Those of us who live in the event world..." but you still haven't told me exactly what are you trying to connect your mac to that needs HDMI or in your case now DP ports.

But see there's the thing. In all these arguments, you're the FIRST person to ever mention full size DP ports. So on top of the 4 Thunderbolt ports that some of us pros need and that can in fact connect to anything else (even if via dongle) Apple needs to include on their MacBook Pros 2-4 USB-A (according to others here). And now according to you it needs TWO HDMI ports and TWO full-size DP ports. Then how many people here, let alone in Apple's typical user base, even know what 12G mini-BNC ports are? I didn't till I just looked it up. So Apple needs to put those on their MBP's as well. Plus according to others it needs SD cards too.

Where are they supposed to draw the line? I think in this particular example it's not me in the fantasy world. Sorry.

This is exactly why they chose to put Thunderbolt 3 on there, because that alone caters to most needs directly, and caters to so many more needs than ever before via adapters ("dongles"). It's an extreme high performance docking port. Through those ports you can connect damn near anything. And this is the first MBP to ever be able to offer that.
 
SD cards are sloooooooow. There's a reason Apple is trying to phase them out. The future of connection between cameras and computers is wireless.

[...]

Apple has always been premature. That's what's always driven the industry to change. This is not a case of Apple should update their Macs to USB-C and wireless only when the industry switches. It's a case of the industry won't switch until Apple (or someone, but historically it's usually been Apple to do this) forces it to.
Wait, if SD cards are slow, then a camera that reads from an SD card then sends the data over wifi is also slow.

There's no wireless camera-to-computer standard that's been widely adopted. There are vendor-specific things that are always a pain to configure. Even if that weren't a problem, and cameras had super-fast internal storage, wifi is slower than SD card read speed.

Since we're all consumers here and not the industry, we just want what works best now. Except in this case the industry was going to USB-C anyway. There's no reason to drop all the ports at once instead of providing USB-C alongside existing ones for a little bit like all other PCs do. Oh, and iPhones still don't use USB-C and probably won't for a long time, which is ridiculous.
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The only bubble I live in is the one created by people who won't give me a straight answer. They keep telling me their computers need all these different ports but no one tells me what devices they're trying to connect their Macs to with the se ports.
I want to connect my Mac to a TV, and that seems like a common use case. In fact I encounter that problem with my friends all the time, and my 2015 MBP saves the day because for some reason their Dell laptops only have mini HDMI.
 
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Please, stop embarrassing yourself! Sometimes i can’t believe the rubbish i am reading here. Get out of mom‘s basement, get a job, feed wife and kids and use actual products. Then come back.

And now we're resorting to insulting people. While still not answering the question.

That's the funny thing. I have a job and I use my iMac Pro and my MacBook Pro for it. And that's it. They are tools that I use for my job, plus various forms of recreation. I make money with the tools. The money pays for the tools and pays for my family to eat and enjoy many aspects of a full life.

My claim is this: People here are whining about ports, specs and the lack of ability to pull their machines apart and self repair or self upgrade them. But very few people here will give me straight answers about actual day to day usage.

That tells me that this forum is loaded with computer enthusiasts who want to f*** with their machines, and complain when they can't. Which is fine, but for those people Apple is not the right company to align themselves with. Never has been. This complaint has been going on for 35 years and Apple is not going to change this.

Apple doesn't give two rips about that market. Apple sells tools for people to do work with and to create and enjoy content with. And for achieving those tasks these things excel. And that's why they can sell them at the prices they sell them and still be on a par with unit sales of manufacturers selling stuff for a fraction of the cost.

If I want to pull apart a car I buy something from the 1980s or 1950s or whatever and enjoy restoring it or whatever. If I want to DRIVE I buy a new or near new BMW and enjoy the DRIVE. And if it breaks I take it to them to fix, (for free because I get the extended warranty of course). And BMW doesn't care that their market share is single digits. And nor do I.

In my experience the people who spout the "get out of mom's basement" line are the ones in mom's basement.

I don't claim to know everything. And I'm not claiming that HDMI is useless. But until someone actually tells me what they actually need to connect their computer to that requires HDMI, I'll remain sadly ignorant. If you're going to complain about my ignorance then maybe help out as I'm requesting, instead of dishing out insults.

Actually a couple of people have mentioned the whole conference room thing, and that's a reasonable use case that would be nice not to have to carry an adapter for, but as I said in one of my responses to that... It's not a particularly large part of Apple's market, and also more and more of those places are upgrading to USB-C connections of one form or another. And why? Because Apple is leading the push for the industry to go that way. Thanks to that, it will be a few more years and USB-C will be the standard for everything, and we'll never need 12 different ports on our laptops, or adapters, again.

Or would you rather Apple didn't do this, now, or in 1998? Because if they hadn't done it 1998 we'd all still be using floppies.

I actually don't have issue with people saying they don't like this particular path Apple has chosen (and has always chosen). It's one thing to say "Well... Apple stuff isn't for me any more because it doesn't have the specific thing I want." But too many people here are saying "Apple's making the wrong decisions for the market, no one wants it this way, etc." Those are the people that need to get out of mom's basement and see the real world of Apple's target market. And they're the ones I'm really taking issue with...

... and you... because you still won't give me a straight answer as to what you need to connect your MBP to that you can't because of Apple's "insane" decisions.
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Wait, if SD cards are slow, then a camera that reads from an SD card then sends the data over wifi is also slow.

There's no wireless camera-to-computer standard that's been widely adopted. There are vendor-specific things that are always a pain to configure. Even if that weren't a problem, and cameras had super-fast internal storage, wifi is slower than SD card read speed.

That's actually a good point and I think I haven't been articulating my point correctly. I'm going to write another post to better articulate my point. Not one directly replying to you, so you don't feel I'm attacking you or anything like that ;)
 
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I've made a lot of posts in this thread the last couple of days because this topic is something I do feel pretty strongly about. This post might be the last or one of the last posts I make on this now because I need to take up the challenge of one person I responded to earlier, and get back to real work and life.

I take issue with a couple of things:


1. People jumping up and down about specs, ports, and not being able to mess with the insides, again as if that stuff specifically is the stuff that matters.

It's not. What matters is using the tool to do the job. At least that's Apple's position. If your goal is to f*** with it then you're not Apple's target market and you haven't been since the first Mac came out in 1984. Let it go. It's never going to happen.


2. People spouting things like "no one likes the keyboard/touch bar/whatever" or "no one wants an All In One" or "everyone wants X port" and Apple's alienating their user base by not listening to that particular complaint.

That's ridiculous because the people saying this can't possibly be speaking for everyone. And those statements completely ignore the facts of what the market is saying with their wallets. If no one wants an AIO, then why do iMacs sell so well? If no one likes the keyboard or touch bar (I happen to rather love the keyboard, although the touch bar I can take or leave) then why are these things selling better than ever? If these people's statements were true then Apple's MBP sales would be plummeting. They're clearly not.


3. People saying or at least suggesting that Apple's decisions are insane because those decisions are not meeting their specific use case as if that's the only one that matters, or back to 2 above and their use case is supposedly everyone's. This comes down partly to the upgradeability stuff I covered above, but to ports more than anything else.

And this ports thing is probably my biggest beef because it goes directly against what I want in a Mac.

I wrote to Tim a year or two before the 2016 MBP came out and I said I was tired of lugging round a machine that had a slew of ports on it I had absolutely no need for. But then again I didn't want to suggest he make a Mac that only catered to MY needs because others have different needs. But with Thunderbolt - the ultimate docking port - everyone could have everything (sure, with adapters). Before TB there was no easy way to have more than one ethernet port. The "fast" port on the Mac was FireWire and there was usually only one of those. There was usually only one kind of video port (so only one external monitor. And driven by a mobile GPU. With thunderbolt I could have everything (including desktop class GPU's "in" my laptop via eGPU).

And in 2016 he gave me exactly what I asked for. A mac with four thunderbolt ports and nothing else (ok he gave me a headphone jack as well). But that said I'm pretty sure they were planning it anyway and I highly doubt my email had anything to do with it. So why did they do it?


The point I'm really trying to make in all the many responses I've posted in this entire thread the last couple of days (which really just started because someone got up my nose and I felt the need to call him out and ... now it's all a bit out of hand lol) is that Apple is trying to push the industry away from the many "standards" it's currently dealing with, and push it towards two:

1. Wireless (Wifi and bluetooth) for everything that doesn't need to be faster than what those offer, and
2. USB-C (the -C port, more than the USB protocol) including Thunderbolt 3 (the protocol) for everything that does.

They have pushed the industry forward in the past to adopt new and better standards, that the industry wouldn't have without them - classic example is the removal of basically everything except USB and CD in the original 1998 iMac. Thanks to that move, followed by the companies that jumped on the bandwagon, we're not all still using floppies, Serial and Parallel ports, etc. today.

And that wasn't the first or last time. Heck the GUI became a reality because of the Mac in the first place, and everyone complained then that that wasn't compatible with anything. Sure each of these technologies existed before Apple did their thing, but if Steve hadn't built the Mac do you think Microsoft or anyone else would have come up with Windows or any other GUI on their own in anywhere near the time frame it happened? Sure, we'd probably have GUI interfaces by now (35 years later), but how much more recently would it have been than it actually was, thanks to the Mac in the first place. How many years (or decades) longer would we have been using text based user interfaces in computers before someone else pushed the GUI? (No, Apple didn't think of it. But they pushed it).

And what about when they released the iPhone and everyone complained it didn't have a physical keyboard? Where would the phone industry be today if Apple hadn't pushed that?

Every time they've done this there's been growing pains. The industry has pushed back every time. And MR readers (or the equivalent of the day) have complained about how it's not compatible with whatever's there at the time, and how they have to adapt one way or another (physical adapters, or change of habits or whatever else).

So yes... Some users still need HDMI. Some users still need SD cards. Some users still need USB-A.

But the absence of these from Apple's computers are already pushing manufacturers to adapt their choices to accommodate Apple.

Example: One person mentioned the pain of configuring any given camera's wifi/bluetooth connection. I can't speak to the pain of that (no experience with it) but I can be confident that as Apple pushes the industry forward it will get much better.

And just like we wonder now how we ever did anything productive without the internet, or how we ever navigated anywhere without GPS, or how we ever communicated without email or cell phones (or facebook lol), one day...

... we'll look back on these silly little SD card things and wonder why we weren't connecting our cameras wirelessly all along.

... we'll look back on the many different sized and shaped ports and connectors (even 12 or so different USB connectors alone!), none of which fit each other, on all our devices, and wonder how we ever connected anything and wonder why everything wasn't one connector in the first place.

...etc.

And we'll be there 10 years sooner than we would otherwise have been, largely (not arrogant enough to think it's solely, but still, largely) because Apple took everything else off their flagship laptops.

Meanwhile, it's only the laptops they're removing everything from. Which makes sense. A laptop is a device you carry everywhere, so you want it to have as little in it as possible while still meeting as much needs as possible. Thunderbolt 3 does that better than anything ever before. Someone here gave a list of four devices attached to his mac, and oh no, we're out of ports! That's idiotic and naive. Thunderbolt 3 is a extreme high performance docking port. If you attach a dock to each of your ports then you can have nearly 50 ports on your Mac. And yes, that's a bit idiotic too, but just pointing it out to point out the idiocy of his comment.

My iMac Pro (and all the iMacs) still have four USB-A ports, SD card port, RJ-45 Ethernet, and yes, even a headphone jack! Contrary to people's comments here, Apple's not insane. There's no reason to take all those off a desktop. But space, weight, and battery life are all at a premium on a laptop. And there is absolutely no way Apple can create the perfect set of miscellaneous ports on their laptops to cater to everyone (Someone here even said the laptops need two HDMI ports and two full sized DP ports. Wtf? Thank god they didn't do that).

So four extreme high performance daisy chainable docking ports on a laptop are the perfect solution that either directly or indirectly meets everyone's needs. Yes, I say indirectly - sometimes you have to buy an adapter or two. But it means you get to choose which ports you want, regardless of what everyone else wants

And if you don't want a million dongles, is one too many? Buy one hyperdrive. And there are a number of different configurations of that product so you can pick and choose which ports you want on that one "dongle". And when you do, the sum total of weight and volume you are carrying with you (with one of those plus a current 15" MBP) is still less than what you carried with you when you had your 2015 MBP and all the ports that come with the hyperdrive. But OMG it's two physical pieces of equipment instead of one. You can remember to carry your power adapter with you. And your keys. And your wallet. You really can't remember this one extra device that has all your ports on it? Or... if you just keep it permanently connected, then you have your 2015 MBP back but with 2018 specs. And Mag-safe whiners? Get any one of these and you can connect it to either side!!

So... perhaps the MBP isn't the perfect device for any one individual because it doesn't have the exact configuration of ports on it that that individual wants. (It's not even perfect for me, despite all my ranting here. Frankly I want 6 or 8 Thunderbolt 3 ports. Yes, I would use them.) But indirectly it's the perfect device for almost everyone. Here's the kicker: They just moved the entire selection of port options external to the machine and shrunk the machine accordingly. What's the problem?

If you read all that and still don't get it, or you get it but still detest it, then yep, Apple isn't for you. No amount of complaining is going to make Apple change this course. Same with their approach to upgradeability and repairability. My suggestion is you get off this forum, switch to Windows, and do something else far more productive and enjoyable with your life.


PS. 2019 Mac Pro...

Upgradeability and repairability? Brace yourselves. I can guarantee the upcoming "modular" Mac Pro is going to be very selective about whatever "modular" means in that context. Apple doesn't want the support nightmare of dealing with every piece of hardware possible out there. And I don't want to have to pay for them to have that nightmare. The absence of that nightmare is a large part of what makes Apple stuff work soooo much better than Windows (and if you don't agree with that statement then you're on the wrong forum in the first place - There's a reason Apple doesn't currently work with NVIDIA).

It's going to a pretty narrow selection of interchangeable options that will do the same thing the MBP's do: Meet the vast majority of practical needs, without necessarily catering to people's specific spec desires (NVIDIA vs AMD? Forget it. AMD does the job. They're running with that and that's it, for now at least) or to people's desire to tinker. They are building a tool with which people can perform their professional jobs. Not a piece of machinery people can take apart and f*** with.

If I had more time and motivation I'd proofread this post more and try to cull it down. I'm sure someone's going to try to tell me I don't have a life because I bothered to write all this in the first place, but its length is because I can't be bothered trying to make my points more concisely, and I'm going to sign off now and get back to my life. ;)
 
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Actually a couple of people have mentioned the whole conference room thing, and that's a reasonable use case that would be nice not to have to carry an adapter for

Even that argument is overblown, I reckon. If you have to tether your laptop to a cable to do a presentation then it matters little when there's a dongle at the end of that cable. In many cases it's actually beneficial, since those HDMI cables, esp. the long ones in meeting rooms, can be bloody thick. But I acknowledge that having to buy (and remember to bring) a dongle is ever so slightly onerous.
 
But what do you use SD for? Cameras presumably? The replacement for SD is wireless. The problem is you're updating your computer to the latest and greatest but not your peripherals and so no it's not compatible. Tech changes.

But if your country is limiting that's a genuine issue, although I can understand if it's not one Apple wants to cater to.

But still... I'm not sure you told me what you're actually using HDMI for exactly? What are you trying to connect to that requires HDMI and can't accommodate anything else?


Transferring over 64gb of files on wifi inside a church during the ceremony is impractically slow, we have onsite slideshows that require some of the wedding photos to be presented by dinner time. You can see why it cant work with over the air transfers. It takes the camera out of action. Plus we have a team of 3 photographers who can just swap out the sd cards and leave the ones needed for back up. I’m open to using a card reader but i tend to avoid them because of past issues with broken connectors or readers. Apple seems to make the most reliable connectors, built in.

For HDMI its practical for presentations during the evening dinner slideshow. I do have a minidisplay port to vga adapter but its nominally important as most venues usually have hdmi or a computer i can pass the slideshow files to.

In summary, i think the older macs just have more built in port versatility for a wide range of professions, mine included.

Ive been seeing colleagues move to windows slowly so i guess that door is open for me too at some point, pun intended.
 
I have said before, and I still think, Bill Gates would make a great "Steve Jobs II" for Apple. He and Jobs were mostly friendly competitors for most of their careers, and Gates had a similar entrepreneur persona. They both came to realize their similarities toward the end of Jobs' life. If Gates would come out of retirement for a few years and resurrect the old spirit of Apple - that would be a real bookend sort of phenomenon. Dell is really just a hardware guy. Jobs and Gates were both in hardware and software.
You may be right. But I am afraid Michael Dell has yet more to “prove” than Bill Gates nowadays - who developed himself into a charity guy. So I’d favor Michael with Graig next to him as lead SW guy, as I tend to think that Graig in his current position has to make too many commercially-based trade-offs to please the billion masses.
 
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Besides the all in one iMac, Apple is not in the desktop business anymore. They abandoned the cheese grater Mac owners by providing nothing next to buy. When my Mac Pro from 2009 dies, I'll either buy another one used from 2010 or a Windows PC. This is Apple's fault. They've abandoned their previous customers.

Yeah, I'm an iMac user and the current models don't make me feel very excited. It appears as though they're wanting to move completely to mobile devices, which sucks. If they released a Mac Mini i7 without soldered RAM, and updated iMac's with better specs I'd be buying them right now. I don't know what their market research is indicating where the market is moving but I think they are making a bad mistake.
 
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"The absence of that nightmare is a large part of what makes Apple stuff work soooo much better than Windows (and if you don't agree with that statement then you're on the wrong forum in the first place - There's a reason Apple doesn't currently work with NVIDIA).

It's going to a pretty narrow selection of interchangeable options that will do the same thing the MBP's do: Meet the vast majority of practical needs, without necessarily catering to people's specific spec desires (NVIDIA vs AMD? Forget it. AMD does the job. They're running with that and that's it, for now at least) or to people's desire to tinker. They are building a tool with which people can perform their professional jobs. Not a piece of machinery people can take apart and f*** with."

Trouble is AMD does NOT do the job. You've obviously never used a CUDA-accelerated app or plugin. You've not had CG renders accelerated by 10x or done fluid simulations 10x faster. The software I have doesn't support AMD GPUs in the same way and Apple itself is sidelining OpenCL, so I think you'll find an awful lot of people need Nvidia GPUs in their system. If the new Mac Pro is AMD only (whether thats internally or via eGPU), then the exodus to Windows will just continue, if not accelerate. I hope I'm wrong as I've been waiting since 2010 to buy a new Mac.
 
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Speak for yourself. My "trash can" is the quietest and best desktop computer I've ever owned.

...and my 2011 MBP is the best laptop I've ever owned. However, if I were buying a brand new Mac today I wouldn't spend $2000 on buying exactly the same hardware. That's the current status of the "trashcan" - the only comparable replacement for the 2013 MacPro currently being sold is... the 2013 MacPro.

That's interesting. On the one hand everyone wants new machines with the new technology, but on the other hand everyone wants to stick to the legacy ports.

What legacy ports??? USB-A is still everywhere, including brand new products. DisplayPort/MiniDisplayPort is what the vast majority of brand new high-end displays use (and only the very latest USB-C equipped computers support DP1.4), while pretty much all TVs and 'economy' PC displays use HDMI. SD/MicroSD features in brand new DSLRs, dashcams, drones. There are 12 million Raspberry Pis out there that are programmed via SD/MicroSD, my phone has MicroSD, my FireTV has MicroSD, I've a Eurorack synth module that uses MicroSD...


My claim is this: People here are whining about ports, specs and the lack of ability to pull their machines apart and self repair or self upgrade them. But very few people here will give me straight answers about actual day to day usage.

Lots of people here have given you straight answers about what they use these ports for - you just dismiss them as wrongthink and just repeat the question. If you're going to behave like that, don't be surprised when people get fed up and start ad-homming you.

That's the funny thing. I have a job and I use my iMac Pro and my MacBook Pro for it.

So, on your desk, you have an iMac Pro - the one up-to-date computer that Apple sells with a half-decent selection of ports - and you've gone for a separate laptop for mobile use. That's your use case.

A lot of people with <=2015 MBPs were quite happily using them as "desktop replacements" - they had enough ports to hook up to all of their desktop clobber, both at home and work and were still small enough to take on the road as needed. If you wanted a TB dock or display for a slightly more convenient connection experience then that was an expensive luxury you could take or leave. The 2016 MBPs turned those hubs into an expensive necessity.


It's not a particularly large part of Apple's market, and also more and more of those places are upgrading to USB-C connections of one form or another.

You don't think that giving presentations is a large part of the market for MacBooks... that suggests that your life has been mercifully powerpoint-free in which case you can probably be excused for not knowing that for many of "those places" having HDMI rather than VGA is still a bit bleeding edge.

Oh, and the modern alternative that is catching on doesn't involve every speaker connecting their laptop to the projector, but rather using Google Docs or some other cloud service that can be accessed from a single computer connected to the projector... but that pre-supposes a reliable internet connection for everybody that doesn't block the required cloud services which, again, is a triumph of optimism over experience (and yours truly has often been the one who needed to worry about coming prepared for plan B - although these days, more and more people are using MS Sway for "presentations" so Plan B can be a lava-lamp and a tape of whalesong which usually imparts more usable information /s).

3. People saying or at least suggesting that Apple's decisions are insane because those decisions are not meeting their specific use case as if that's the only one that matters

I think you should perhaps look into the mirror there, because you seem to be the one dismissing everybody else's use-case because the current MBPs "work for you".

Before TB there was no easy way to have more than one ethernet port. The "fast" port on the Mac was FireWire and there was usually only one of those. There was usually only one kind of video port (so only one external monitor.

Why are you comparing 2010 Macs to 2016 Macs as if nothing came between? Thunderbolt arrived in 2011 - followed in 2012 by macs with two Thunderbolt ports, 2 USB ports, HDMI (giving three possible display connections and four ports that could take ethernet ports).

You're even doing down the older Macs - until the 17" was dropped in 2012 you could have a MBP with an expresscard slot which could be used to add, well, practically anything - ethernet, card readers, USB3... My 2011 MBP 17" has Thunderbolt and Firewire and Expresscard.

...and that's really the problem: not the 2016/2017/2018 MBPs per se but the lack of choice. Apple are #4 by volume in the list of PC vendors, all of whom now offer premium "ultrabooks" aimed at the same market as the MBP. Apple, however, are about the only one on that list who can't contrive to also offer a larger, desktop replacement laptop for people who don't prioritise weight, thinness and battery life over all else, or a tower system for users who prefer the computer equivalent of a pick-up truck or a jeep to a sports coupe.

Circa 2011, Apple did offer that sort of choice - 17" MBPs for people who wanted that, MacBook Air for people who wanted really small, the Cheesegrater for the pick-up-truck fans, (up-to-date) Mac Mini for people who wanted a desktop but didn't care about internal expansion etc...

Even when the 2012 rMBP was launched without (shock! horror!*) an optical drive or ethernet port & compulsory expensive SSD, rather than suddenly pull the rug out from under people, Apple simultaneously upgraded the "classic" models to the latest CPU/GPU and USB3 so there was an up-to-date alternative available for a year or so. C.f. 2016 when the only "alternative" was the least powerful version of the already out-of-date 2015 model at an excitingly new higher price (at least, it was in the UK).

(* not quite forgiven them for the ethernet port, but my optical drive had long been replaced by a second HD by then - and, as I said, they spec-bumped the "classic" models at the same time).
 
It’s only one tap dude! Tap on the volume control and then slide your finger up or down to change volume. One quick gesture including only one tap. Same with brightness! Love it.


What you are describing is infinitely more complex than the manual key controls , and not the least bit intuitive .
People really should think things through - different and/or new design does not always equal progress .
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But what do you use SD for? Cameras presumably? The replacement for SD is wireless. The problem is you're updating your computer to the latest and greatest but not your peripherals and so no it's not compatible. Tech changes.


Tech doesn't change, it evolves . Big difference .
Evolution is inclusive and allows for compatibility, which is getting more and more important as requirements for new technology are changing constantly, while current and a lot of older tech remains relevant .

Apple tries to predict the future and force few and random changes on its users in a very narrow minded fashion, as they proved with the nMP and current MBPs .

And no, wireless is not the answer to everything ; it wasn't 20 years ago when that argument was first made, and it still isn't .
 
Why didn't I buy one: The storage is un-upgradable, so you have to buy up front at extortionate prices. With an equivalent to the 3TB storage currently in my 2010 MBP that'd make it worth more than my car cost me.

Then if the logic board dies after a year (or 3 tops if you buy applecare), all your ridiculously expensive SSD is scrap, or vice versa if the SSD dies the rest of it is scrap.
 
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