As all our stuff is held in the cloud - which I dislike very much - less and less stuff we want to connect to our machine.
A few years back it was so annoying when they started to get rid of optical drives, but now nobody misses it. Soon we wont give a rats ass about USB as well. Especially on laptops, because on a desktop you will still need it for a few peripherals. But on a laptop where everything is built in...<p>My opinion is, that magsafe was awesome. I hate having everything in the cloud.<p>And yes, these guys will do whatever they want. Because 98% of their customer base don't give a damn and even if they do, they will still buy it, because of brand loyalty and other reasons.
By limiting the number of ports they were able to make it even thinner than the Macbook Air. While it can be disturbing not to have multiple port, you will be able to charge and connect an HDMI BUT... you will need an (expensive) adaptator from Apple or a (hopefully cheap) from another manufacturer.<p>Source: <a href="http://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/176001/how-does-usb-c-on-the-new-macbook-air-retina-also-called-the-macbook-connect-t" rel="nofollow">http://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/176001/how-does-usb...</a>
Because most folks don't use more than a port at a time. Stroll through a university campus and you'll notice that most folks with a Macbook pro/air aren't using even 1 port (the charger) as the battery life has gotten good enough such that you can charge in your dorm and then be good for mixed use throughout the day.<p>I remember how much pushback there was about getting rid of the CD drive too, but the truth was they weren't being used that much anymore anyway.
It's simple range differentiation. The MacBook/Air can't be allowed to become so complete that there's lessening reason to spend more on a Pro.<p>- They giveth Retina<p>- They taketh ports
I really hope Apple isn't going to make this a trend across their line, and that others don't follow suit. That said, given that they made it a "new" line, I think it may have a place. e.g. for some moderate to high percentage of people that use a laptop they rarely or never plug anything into it. And those same people are usually the ones on the go a lot, so this might really have a good fit for those people (e.g. weight savings and super thin).<p>For developers it is IMO a horrible fit; however, for traveling sales force it might be a decent fit, especially with so many Projectors being WiFi and more businesses now have Airplay available (this one shocked me but it is nice).<p>I am far from a Apple fan boy, in fact it took me a forever to purchase a Macbook pro, but I will say it has been one of the nicest pieces of hardware I have owned. That said, I also still own and love my Toshiba laptop too as it is a power house and was easy to upgrade and expand.
Product Pipelines are tricky.<p>I feel on the one hand, they could have retained both ports and the retina screen.<p>On the same token, you want to increase the legacy of a market driven product line. Correct me if I'm wrong here but you want to "intentionally" flaw the product to provide room for improvement on the next generation.<p>I'm sure the Product Dev. team has an idea on their pipeline as to what the 5th generation should look like and what their prospective specs are for the 6th generation product after the 5th is finally locked down for confirmation.
The only positive I can think of is if there is an easy to plug in hub with thunderbolt/hdmi out along with a few usb-c ports that would allow me to use one plug when setting up with my external monitor and timemachine drive. Then I'd be ok with one plug.<p>It would be nice to have one on each side and avoid having to purchase/use a hub. And be able to plug in on either side to charge.
Using USB-C wasn't the problem. The real problem is - they put only one port there. You cannot charge while you are connected to an HDMI projector / external HDD or a pen-drive.<p>But the latest Google Chromebook "Pixel" has two USB-C ports on either sides of the device.
Off topic, a recent viral video parodying apple's design choices - <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KHZ8ek-6ccc" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KHZ8ek-6ccc</a>