
Dongle dilemma provokes Apple price cut - stesch
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-37880723
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daveguy
Apple is becoming more and more of a fashion accessory. They do very well with
this approach. When they dropped the audio jack in the iPhone 7 for a dongle
mediated or wireless interface I thought they jumped the shark. It appears
their sales are suffering because of it. Until 2012 or so I had a laptop with
a serial port, because working with serial devices was unreliable with usb to
serial dongles. Declaring that standard usb ports are legacy will only slow
sales of laptops. Very few people want to keep up with a wad of dongles.
Laptops should be convenient. It is relatively easy to plug into any
presentation display with an hdmi cable and I am happy to have a VGA port on
my circa 2012 laptop (ram and ssd upgraded). When people can't use their
machine like everyone else, they don't think "Ohh I have such a modern
laptop". They think "This is inconvenient and unproductive. I will think twice
about buying this in the future."

~~~
acomjean
The macbook pro was a workhorse. Well built, lots of connectivity and useful
for whatever life threw at it. A little bulky, Not sleek and elegant. Macbook
air (and new macbook) are the sleek light and beautiful models.

They're making the macbook pro more like the "air" and "macbook", pretty to
look at but much less functional. People who like the OS are left with no
where to get the machine they need and aren't happy.

While usb c is the future, its going to be a long time before the usb a port
goes away.

The lack of ports usable without dongles significantly hurt functionality.
sometimes its just the number of ports, for example: College intern with air
bemoans the lack of ability to connect our fast wired internet and monitor at
same time as one thunderbolt port. This kind of thing can't help but hurt your
reputation. I use every port on my macbook rmbp except the sd card for
bioinformatics job, (2 monitors [2 dongles], gig -ethernet[dongle], external
drive, external keyboard and mouse). I could in theory get a dock, but its an
unnecessary pain.

~~~
boulos
I think the claim of people with newer monitors is that the hub is built in.
So no need for a separate dock, just plug your keyboard and mouse into your
monitors (I do this on my Dells today) and then when you "dock" your laptop
you now get power, Ethernet, display and peripherals all attached to the thing
that's actually fixed in place (the displays).

Each of my Dell monitors has 2 or 3 USB ports (and today, I have to connect to
them using a single USB to the laptop in addition to each display port
connection). I think this new future won't be that bad, but it will require
new displays.

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privong
For reference, this article received a substantial number of comments
yesterday:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12877381](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12877381)

~~~
mancerayder
I thought HN auto-redirects you to the main post if you try to post a
duplicate? I wonder why the dups keep happening. It's not detecting them?

~~~
lisper
Two different URLs:

[http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-37880723](http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-37880723)

[http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-37880723](http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-37880723)

~~~
boulos
Maybe the mods could also de-dupe some of these hostnames (like m.nytimes.com
and nytimes.com).

Though now thanks to AMP, it might make more sense to de-dupe on known
prefixes rather than Host particularly. Sadly, for the BBC at least that won't
work, since the URLs look like they do /amp instead of their usual sections:

[https://www.google.com/amp/www.bbc.co.uk/news/amp/36788782?c...](https://www.google.com/amp/www.bbc.co.uk/news/amp/36788782?client=safari)

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dasmoth
The LG 4K and 5K monitors that were announced at the same time as the new MBPs
have also had a substantial (temporary) price cut.

I think it's the pricing on the machines themselves that really startled
people, though.

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sambe
They claim you cannot connect a new iPhone to a new MacBook Pro without a
dongle. Even ignoring the fact that you probably don't have to, you can do
this wirelessly. Is it really necessary to buy a dongle for your iPhone for
anything realistic?

~~~
Trombone12
I didn't know you could charge over wireless! That's really cool!

~~~
sambe
Wow, downvotes for a reasonable question. I never need to connect my phone to
my laptop. I've also spotted a pattern of the BBC saying dubiously truthful
things recently in tech articles. Example from main evening news last week:
"foreigners get better mobile reception in the U.K. than we do". So, no, they
obviously don't. But they roam between providers (at cost), as has been the
case for decades.

The phone comes with a charger.

~~~
gaius
It's not recent - their tech journalism has always been pretty poor. The BBC
is a branch of the civil service culturally; anyone who understands science or
tech but can't conjugate latin verbs stands no chance.

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Hydraulix989
Why and how is it a "dilemma"? If anything, it should be called a "bad product
decision" \-- since they get rid of all of those ports.

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lips
Not only are these not dongles, most people have never seen a dongle.

~~~
Godel_unicode
It sounds like you're using a different definition of "dongle" than most
people?

~~~
honkhonkpants
Dongle was originally a thing that you plugged into a computer that allowed it
to execute expensive licensed software like PRO/Engineer or Softimage.

