An old man frustrated by modern technology.....

OTOH, my parents have Google Photos and the Internet, there's no longer a need to physically transport files. But yeah, everyone's needs are different.

Well in my case, and likely in the case of many others, I'm not sacrificing anything. The USB ports on my laptop are caked up with dust most of the time.

Not "because Apple said so", but because adopting new standards is a chicken-and-egg situation. Device manufacturers (flash drives, microphones, etc) won't bother with USB-C unless there's computers with ports, clone manufacturers won't add ports unless they're going to be useful. Someone has to "go first". Apple have decided to take that risk. Should they have also provided a USB-A port or two for convenience while people transition? Maybe. But if they're that important to you, don't buy the new MBP. Nobody's forcing you to.

They have, and they've done well to do so. But it's hit a limit. There's no more room for additional conductors in the USB-A shell, and they've had to develop those weird frankenstein USB-B and Micro USB connectors to support USB-3. Not ideal.

USB-C is reversible, supports higher charging current, supports multiple non-USB PHY protocols (DisplayPort, MHL, HDMI, & Thunderbolt now, PCIe and Ethernet in future), uses the same connector on the host and the device, has out-of-band signalling, and so forth.

USB-A has served us well, but we can't cling to these things forever.

 

I myself prefer a mac to the alternative as I've been using windows most all of my life. While a VM is an option, I prefer the real thing. I'm also constantly using my CD drive for one thing or another, so the superdrive is always a need, but I don't undersrand why everyone says that macs are trash, as with old er macs (and macbooks up to '12) they allow modification of their inner parts, but yeah, the whole thing with one port only and that being USB-C, that is pretty poor, and that is the same with their iPhone 7, hopefully they notice their mistakes for both and change them back, as this is not "cutting edge", this is money milking of the consumer. They also need to lower their prices, as they are making more money than they are spending.

And this is coming from an "Apple fanboy".

 

Am I the only person that finds it amusing that if you buy Apple's latest phone and their latest computer you can't even connect them to each other without buying an adapter or an extra cable?

 

Soooo, what if your parents literally just got a cell phone for the first time like mine?
Also, I guess thread title hints at this, there's some of us that just don't like to do everything on the cloud. It's kind of like why I like buying physical CD's and Vinyl, or physical games to digital download. I get it, you can fit thousands of whatevers on the interwebs to stream from wherever you are(with internet)! There's something just reassuring, simple, and personal about going "Here, I took these pictures for you" *hands over drive/disc/printed photos*.

I realized I'm not forced to buy the new MBP, but the scary part is Apple does have the following to be able to change things for everything. Look at smart phones. Yeah they're cool, but now the planets covered in zombies. I can't even hang out with my friends properly anymore, whenever they come over they're looking at their damn phones every 2 seconds.

I know I sound like an old man, but dammit, some things don't need to move forward so quickly. I still want some sort of physical medium to buy my music and videos. I like the effort they put into the covers, insides, and booklets when applicable. I like finding a place to display it, to show how proud I am to have collected them. I like physically giving my mom a photo, looking at the joy in her face first hand, and then she'll give me a hug or some shit. Making everything digital just seems to take some of the living part of life away, it seems all people want to do is share crap on the internet now, way easier than visiting.

Damn...that got out of hand. USB C sounds good and all, just something wrong about trying to wipe the past so quickly I guess.

The headphone jack though...you couldn't even pay me into thinking that was a good idea to omit =P

 

Especially because they used to pride themselves if their seemless ecosystem...

But honestly, a single USB-A and three USB-C and they'd have shut up the critiques.

For the audio jack: dual lightning port would have sufficed to calm everyone.

 

Arguably in the case of USB-C that's a good thing? Even if the new MBP isn't a runaway success, it'll nudge the industry towards USB-C a bit harder than the Nexus 5's did.

It's not like other manufacturers will just drop USB-A overnight because of this. That'd be crazy.

Remember that back in the 90s, the iMac was the first consumer-oriented computer with no serial, no parallel, and no floppy. Nerds gave it shit then too, but look where we are now. It took a few years yet for the clone world to wean itself off those interfaces, but Apple demonstrated that it was viable.

This is another thing where if you asked me 5 years ago, yeah, it would be essential.

But now, my headphones are A2DP, my car stereo has A2DP, my home stereo has AirPlay, so if it went away ... mmm, yeah, points against, but it wouldn't be a deal breaker.

 

The bad part being USB-A being phased out, causing all retro stuff that uses it to start requiring old computers.

Hey I miss floppies =P

Nooope, there's no way I would be happy enough with Bluetooth only music. Hell, I use my bluetooth speaker, hooked up to a bluetooth phone, using the 3.5mm cord. No skips, no pops in or out, improved volume for whatever reason(I don't see a technical reason for bluetooth connections to attenuate volume..), and not to mention improved quality when using high resolution files.

I use studio speakers and flac files for music, bluetooth ain't gonna cut it!

Anyway, I will agree to disagree here, I feel like we're hogging this thread =P

 

To be honest, my biggest problem with this machine isn't the USB-C, although I tend to regard it as another sign of Apple's total contempt for their customers. It's simply the fact that - like every other machine Apple have released in the last 4 years, it's a completely non-expandable machine. A disposable computer. That costs $4k. The last Mac I bought was a mid-2012 MacBook Pro - which I bought after the retina models were already out. If Apple carry on the way they are going, it's also going to be the last Mac I will ever buy.

 

Lol how is this a flame thread, this is called discussion and it's what forums are for.

 

Agreed. Most products are disposable, but sadly, that's just how they make money.

Speedyink, I agree with you as I prefer physical media to digital (call me old fashioned if you want) and it feels nice to hold a disc in my hand.

P.S. I still use 3.5in. diskettes

 

No Windows 7 computer here has updates enabled. Nothing more annoying than sitting down to do something only to have the resource hog windows up date run and hold you hostage for something that was going to take you 5 minutes.

It's really the XBOX fanbase that ruined it for me. The way people like Crapgamer drone on about Sony you'd think Yoshida killed his entire family or something. But I'll be happy to get Killer Instinct on this laptop, and Cuphead is a given.

 

My musician friend is using two Macs for DJing, one of them being just in case the first one fails. Since 2011, the first machine never failed and the second one have been opened just to synchro it with the first.

As for sequencers, more and more people use software. Less pricey and less problems than with actual hardware.

I don't hate Linux, I just don't take it seriously, especially with systemd which is basically Linux following the Windows route. And anyone using Windows seriously knows this isn't the road to take.

 

Is Mint the way to go with Linux or is unbuntu the preferred distro?

 

Ubuntu, Debian, Elementary OS, all good for beginners. Arch is nice if you know linux, and Antergos makes installation super easy if you're lazy. Don't tell an Arch user you used Antergos though, they'll string ya up.

If you're gonna go Ubuntu, Xubuntu is my preference.

 

All flavors of Ubuntu (and Debian) are basically equivalent in features for the end user, the big difference is the desktop environment. Just choose what you prefer: Ubuntu, {K/X/L}ubuntu, elementary OS, mint. Knowing you a little, installing Arch would only result in a new rant thread.

I use normal Ubuntu with unity because it's uncluttered and I navigate with kb shortcuts so I don't really see the dock/dash all that much, I got used to it in the end.

A small bemol, I've read the latest elementary OS version (Loki) has stability issues. The one before that is great though, especially for underpowered netbooks.

 

Well, the updates don't come very often for Windows 7 anymore because it's already mature. Compared to the update mess that happens in Windows 10. >_>

You could stay on Windows 7. It'll still remain supported for a few years more. And even after that, nobody is stopping you from moving staying with it either.
With good hardware and software, it will work quite well. I have rarely seen BSODs since Windows XP. The only time when it happens, is when my hardware is starting to crap out.

But like with anything else (regardless of whatever OS you use), adding an SSD would probably help a lot.
Even if it is to not make the Windows update process invisible, it makes your boot times amazing. You can even carry the SSD to your next PC, so it won't go to waste.
You don't even need to have an expensive SSD.

 

I'm putting at least 256GBs to the next lappy as an SSD option maybe more since I'll just be using older versions of Works and Photoshop and won't need to buy that software with the system.

 

Been using Fedora 23 for the last few weeks. Love it! Gnome has gotten on quite well, and it's refreshing to load up a distribution on an Skylake ultra book (Asus ux305ca) and everything works out of the box. Keeping a small windows partition for some legacy software, but Fedora has been and will continue to be my daily driver

Edit. Dam you autocorrect, or beer....

 

I tend to use Mint these days. At work we have a mix of ubuntu redhat and centos

 

The lack of ports and no options of user-based cusomtability really drives apples push to have it the way they want it. It doesn't really cater to customers, or fans. Room for both user driven and company pushed upgrades are key.
they are hella pretty though.