SD card:
Please NO. Any PRO will have the adapters already for years. Apple's SDcard adapter is actually a pretty good one. Any PRO buying a new 2021 camera will have CFexpress cards and will need an adapter (or two) anyway. Moreove those cards run HOT: better not put them inside the laptop. But luckily Apple is Apple and Apple has always been on the forefront to adopt new ports and get rid of obsolete ones earlier than the PC world does. If they do add an SD port: it might be on an air or so - but I stongly doubt they will.
HDMI:
The USB-C/Thunderbolt 4 port is fundamentally extremely more versalite. So having more of the thunderbolt ports is always going to make the laptop more versatile.
I do grant the "need" for an adapter to HDMI and/or VGA as a real one: it's too often that people expect you to hook up to a beamer or so. But I've long since learned to carry a dongle in my laptop bag for those cases. I'm sure anybody else in the same position has already the exact same solution in place.
USB-A:
No, just No. No backwards paddling. Get USB-C cables instead. It's been 5 years. Get the cables you need instead of trying to keep the boat anchor in place stopping all progress.
magsafe:
It could be interesting to see what they came up with, but personally with a laptop that's supposed to use *less* power, why bother at all. A Thunderbolt cable's 100W max is plenty to power any and all Apple Silicon laptop they could come up with. I did deplore the loss of the magsafe connector 5 years ago, tried a few USB-C variants from 3rd parties, but they all failed over time miserably. So I've been back to using the apple power cable for a number of years already. It works just fine, and they do last.
USB-C/Thunderbolt 3/4 ports:
Can't have enough of them I'm regularly maxed out on all 4 ports on my laptop. And use a ton more on my MP7,1 (which has 14 of them ... 8 thunderbolt 3 - rest merely usb-c)
Camera:
It will be interesting to see how Apple finds space in a thin lid for a "better" camera that so many seem to need for stupid meetings. Physics are too often ignored on these forums, but Apple's engineers will know and have to deal with physics nonetheless. I for one don't care much about that camera. Mostly those getting bad images out of them are doing the lighting wrong (light needs to be on your face, not on the background behind you) and 1080p, 4K isn't going to fix any of that.
Touchbar:
Back to hell with that piece of crap. I utterly hate it and curse every single time I accidentally brush it and it triggers something unwanted. The return of physical function keys might be reason enough for me to buy yet another new laptop just for getting rid of that horror alone.
M1X/M2/...
The real star is however going to be the Apple Silicon. How fast, how much GPU, how much other things like machine learning etc. will they have added in a year.
This will be interesting to see where they might go with their plans for next year's MP and how they might deal with non-integrated GPUs and the like. Probably not going to reveal much as they can most likely push the GPU on the SOC far enough for anything a laptop might need, but we can hope they'll reveal something.
For the rest: These rumors are setting us all up for disappointment. And that's utterly sad. Just wait till Monday before you get your hopes up that any of the leaks had anything right.
on October 18 at 10 a.m. PDT. Tap the heart and we'll send you a reminder on event day."
