I am not an old timer and in fact pretty young, so I have a completely different viewpoint. I am getting more joy out of my newer Apple products than I ever got out of my older Apple products. The fact that the new MBP will drop the HDMI port or the SD Card reader is not that important to me frankly. People are using their systems differently and have adopted different workflows than were common in the past, but that doesn't mean they are any less deserving of the Pro moniker. Things change, and I think switching to USB-C for everything is a good decision. It's a new standard, but it will nonetheless take over, right?
The "old timers" need to learn to embrace the time they are living in rather than romanticizing the past in my opinion. Oh, and I don't know what Jobs has to do with anything. If were still alive, Apple would probably be embarking on the exact same course. Under his tenure, Apple removed the floppy, old Apple IO, and the optical drive.
Nice finger wagging there. Honestly, I've embraced more changes than you even realize existed unless you took a course in ancient computing. So your comments do come off as thin, yes. The fact that the HDMI port and SD card are not important to you is not the standard of a pro machine. Again, Apple makes two nice laptop lines that do not have these options, if that is what you are looking for. But generally people buying a high end computer want as many of the likely ports they might encounter internally so as to avoid schlepping extra dongles. That is one of the reasons you pay the big $ for the MBP over the MB.
HDMI is still the video standard for TVs. People, that's professional, do on occasion make presentations and hook in their computer to a monitor. So to say workflows are changing, well, the presentation hasn't changed that much yet. And the SD card, it's just convenience. It costs Apple minimal and it just sits there patiently until it's needed. That is a lot more useful than shaving off a few mm of the case. I don't see how workflows are enhanced by a thinner case in that regard.
I have no bones about the move to USB-C. In fact I've been cheering it on here at MR. Glad to see it, but, in addition to the other ports like HDMI and SD slot and, yes, even a dedicated TB3/MDP port. A $2K pro machine with
just 4 USB-C ports -- one which must be used for power unless, hey, you have a dongle -- is ridiculous, not tech forward.
And as for your Jobs history lesson -- He ditched the floppy on a brand new model first, the iMac. It was a couple years before the pro machines didn't have a floppy and by that time they really were obsolete because of CD-R. In fact, I owned the first PowerBook w/ no floppy. Fantastic machine.
Old Apple I/O - you mean like NuBus and SCSI? They were obsolete dinosaurs too when they were ditched. Nothing like HDMI today.
Optical drives - again Apple ditched them when it was clear there were better alternatives. As I write today, TV monitors still use HDMI almost exclusively, and cameras largely use SD, with a few top end DSLRs using CF. So yes, HDMI and SD are still relevant in 2016 unlike all the examples you chose to give.
