The new Macbooks are so close to being great it's annoying. The specs are fine by me and I'm neutral on the Touch Bar, but the price and lack of ports just makes them not worth it. While I'm glad Apple is trying to move the industry to use USB-C for everything, it wouldn't had killed them to include some USB 3.0 ports and an HDMI port.
It's going to be at least 3-5 years until the industry uses USB-C and by that point a new series of Macbook Pro will have been released.
This applies to the non-Touch Bar Macbook as well. Price and specs are fine, but why does it only have two USB-C ports?
The lack of USB 3.0 ports I can understand. USB-C is the successor and, while still common, those older USB ports are legacy technology now. But HDMI is still current tech. The latest TVs still all use HDMI and requiring a special cable to hook up my laptop to a TV is a non-starter since the typical use case is hooking up my laptop to a friend's TV using the cable that's already plugged into their TV.
It feels like the removal of the HDMI port is an attempt to get people to buy an AppleTV. On this "pro" model of laptop, they don't want people connecting it to a TV. But, at least for me, this doesn't cover my use case.
> it wouldn't had killed them to include some USB 3.0 ports and an HDMI port.
Magsafe, USB Type A, HDMI, and Mini DisplayPort / Thunderbolt 1/2 are all literally too wide to fit within the width of the new laptop’s sides. They would have needed to make the whole laptop noticeably thicker or otherwise differently shaped to fit any of those. The headphone jack barely fits.
And it's far from the only ultrabook around that thickness with those kind of ports. I'm just amused that it has more variety of ports than the Pro machine which costs 3 to 4 times as much. (though, no thunderbolt 3)
But it's not even in the same market as the Macbook Pro, it should be competing with the Macbook. I was kind of hoping to upgrade it to a Macbook Pro when the new model was released.
Apple is removing ports for a reason.. Jhonny Ive just revealed a couple days/weeks ago I'm not sure that Apple was headed towards a wireless future.. and that seems to be the reason they're reducing/removing ports.
> I'm glad Apple is trying to move the industry to use USB-C for everything
They make the device itself simple & light, but at the expense of having a ton of octopuses hanging around for whenever you actually need to plug it into anything. They've been doing this for a while, including the Mac Pro.
Yeah, this is basically my opinion too. Luckily I was due for an upgrade last year when the Broadwells came out so Im set for a few years, otherwise this would have been a painful update for me.
I believe is fair for them to raise prices if they need to in order to properly achieve their targets. I'm willing to pay those prices every 3-4years for a better machine where I do 100% of my work. But they need to make them worth the price!
Instead, they removed a lot of useful things used every day by me, added things many won't have a use for (I use my laptop docked most of the time) and still they didn't make them top of the line spec wise (8gb/256gb at 2000$, max only 16gb), while being 500$ for the same BTO options!.
It's going to be at least 3-5 years until the industry uses USB-C and by that point a new series of Macbook Pro will have been released.
This applies to the non-Touch Bar Macbook as well. Price and specs are fine, but why does it only have two USB-C ports?