See, I use a retina MBP touchbar and really don't agree. Apple has made some missteps but it's still the best pro laptop for my uses. Over two years with one replaced keyboard (because I spilled wine on it!) and no sticking keys.
USB-C is awesome. I can reuse all my 3rd party and Apple adapters for my USB-C peripherals, including tablets and the Nintendo Switch. In retrospect, Magsafe wasn't that great (comes off too easily). Moving back to older USB ports really would make no sense. They're obsolete. If you have older peripherals, get the dongles. We've been using dongles since the VGA/DVI days or Serial/USB days, so I really don't get the problem with them. Life moves on.
I have a need for HDMI and VGA and Mini DisplayPort and old USB... not to mention lightning. MUCH rather would have a single standard of multi-port w/ dongles than a mess of fixed ports.
Also, on what planet did anyone have a Magsafe cord over 2m? It was fixed to the adapter. The 2m usb-c cable is removable, add it with the 1m (edit: 2m!) power cable and it is a further reach than any prior Mac laptop adapter I've had, though I suppose third party ones exist.
> Also, on what planet did anyone have a Magsafe cord over 2m? It was fixed to the adapter. The 2m usb-c cable is removable, add it with the 1m power cable and it is a further reach than any prior Mac laptop adapter I've had, though I suppose third party ones exist.
The power brick had a 2m detachable line-voltage cable, and fixed 2m low voltage cable. 2 + 2 = 4. I can sit 4m from the wall and charge using only the power adapter that came with the computer.
I'm also confused why you seem to think that Apple couldn't engineer a low voltage cable with connectors at both ends. Wouldn't that solve the cable fraying issue mentioned in your other post?
I see many people making the same argument as you: that USB-C is better because the cable is detachable from the power brick. Can you help me understand why you believe that Apple needed to move to USB-C to on the computer end in order to make a cable removable at the power supply end?
Apple could have easily had the best of both worlds: Put a USB-C plug on the cable and USB-C receptacle on the power brick. Then put both USB-C and magsafe receptacles on the computer. The USB-C -> magsafe cable could either be included with the computer or sold as an optional extra.
> The power brick had a 2m detachable line-voltage cable, and fixed 2m low voltage cable. 2 + 2 = 4. I can sit 4m from the wall and charge using only the power adapter that came with the computer.
You can use the very detachable line-voltage cable on your Apple's 60W (or was it 80?) USB-C charger too. The cable is removable at the power supply end.
> The power brick had a 2m detachable line-voltage cable, and fixed 2m low voltage cable. 2 + 2 = 4. I can sit 4m from the wall and charge using only the power adapter that came with the computer.
There's also the usual Apple Upgrade tax, the old charger was 85-90 euros and came with 4m of cable. The new one comes without a cable, is 99 euros and needs a 30 euro USB-C PD cable.
The new one is also much more useful, because it charges any arbitrary USB device: smartphones, tablets, visitors’ PC laptops, miscellaneous small gadgets, ...
Also, if the USB-C cord frays or breaks, it is replaceable.
I’m a bit sad about the loss of the magnetic connector, but overall I much prefer the new chargers.
I still wish someone would get around to putting 2–3 USB-C ports in a power strip which were capable of charging laptops though.
The old MagSafe stuff you could only (legitimately) buy from Apple. The USB-C stuff you can buy from anyone, and there are some decent quality cables and power supplies available that don't require you to pay the Apple tax.
> "Can you help me understand why you believe that Apple needed to move to USB-C to on the computer end in order to make a cable removable at the power supply end?"
The thing is, once you make the cable detachable at both ends, it eliminates the need for MagSafe in the first place.
A USB-C laptop will not go flying across the room if someone trips on the cable, because the cable will detach at either or both ends before that happens.
That's not quite true. The USB-C port is pretty strong relative to MagSafe. Depending on the surface where my laptop is resting, the laptop will move before the cable detaches.
I'm not going to test this, but I seriously doubt it.
My 13" MacBook is very light, and I can even lift it half way with the USB-C cable. Pretty certain it would fly to the floor if my feet swept the cable that way. Of course, I don't have it set up so that can happen.
Good point about the MacBook - they're much lighter than my MacBook Pro.
I'm surprised you can actually pick it up by the cable, however! The fit of the power cable in the USB-C ports on my (2017) 13" Pro is very loose - in fact, sometimes the power cable slips out on it's own with even a small movement. Maybe this has changed in the 13" MacBook?
> "The power brick had a 2m detachable line-voltage cable, and fixed 2m low voltage cable. 2 + 2 = 4. I can sit 4m from the wall and charge using only the power adapter that came with the computer."
You can still do this with the USB-C power brick. Apple sell the matching extension cable, or you can re-use one from an old MagSafe brick.
USB-C has lots of advantages, but it took 2-3 dark years before we started seeing commonly available peripherals that take advantage of the built-in protocols such as driver-less USB-C Ethernet adapters. I think USB-C on the iPad Pro and various phones has done more to turn USB-C into a viable standard than putting it on the laptops, since pros would obviously prefer existing and new Thunderbolt devices to USB-C devices. They could have moved iPhone/iPad to USB-C and used the MFI program to encourage USB-C for three years there, while adding USB-C support in a backwards-compatible way to their existing laptops. I would have been happy if they simply left me an HDMI port. As much as I want AirPlay everywhere, it's only in 2019 that we can buy a TV with AirPlay and make truly wireless/dongle-less Mac connections possible, which was the dream with Miracast on Windows/Android and the reality for many years with Chromecast.
Also, Magsafe might have come off easily, but every time it did, I went "oh, that is a nice feature!" I never once complained that I couldn't charge my laptop with it, the battery would die before the magsafe adapter would. Plus, why did Apple remove functionality from their power cords, forcing you to buy all the cables for the power cord separately? There were so many downgrades to the MacBook Pro, I wonder why I stuck with it... (Frankly, Windows was just that bad at the time. It's since improved, so maybe that'll light a fire under Apple a bit.)
A lot of people made the same argument when Jobs removed the cd drive from laptops. It seemed like an issue at the time given most software was still installed from CDs. After a two year dark period where you had to use an external cd drive, most people didn’t miss it.
The first USB-C MacBook came out four years ago. I've just taken a look at Amazon: the top hits for keyboards are USB-A, the top hits for projectors use HDMI, the top hits for 4K screens have HDMI and DisplayPort ports. Apple's portable devices all ship with USB-A charging cables. Do USB-C thumbdrives even exist?
Yes, some transitions in the past worked really well. That doesn't mean that other transitions are automatically going to be a success.
ThunderBolt 3 is successful as a successor to the niche port that was ThunderBolt 2: for eGPUs, docking stations, some displays. USB-C seems to be doing okay in replacing Micro-USB. But HDMI, USB, and (for what they do) SD cards and Ethernet seem like they're almost in the same categories as wall sockets by now.
The top hit for laptop in a windows machine, so what?
I remember being so worried about dongles and got extra. But then I found it better to just replace the cable to the printer and not have a dongle. Now they sit in a drawer unused.
The only hits I find on google are for a few sandisk drives with terrible amazon reviews reporting they're slow and get searing hot in the drive after only a few seconds of use. I'm kind of surprised sandisk would release that, one reviewer even reports theirs smoking after being inserted into a recent MBP. I'm also a bit surprised nobody has produced a working drive yet? Maybe there's so little demand for thumb drives these days it's just not worth the r&d to accomodate the standard with adequate cooling.
I found the Magsafe adapter cords would fray, corrode, and blacken pretty easily, becoming a fire hazard. Every Macbook I owned, I would need at least one replacement over a 3 year period.
The amount of time taken to re-plugin it in vs. times it saved my laptop from flying, really it was an overrated feature. USB-C comes out easily enough.
Don't get me wrong, I liked Magsafe. But I don't understand the passion for it, it had flaws and was a (nifty) minor feature.
>I found the Magsafe adapter cords would fray, corrode, and blacken pretty easily, becoming a fire hazard. Every Macbook I owned, I would need at least one replacement over a 3 year period.
That wasn't a fundamental problem with the MagSafe connector, but yet another symptom of Apple's detrimental obsession with aesthetics. The cable (like all Apple cables in recent years) had inadequate strain relief. Apple knew this, but decided that frayed and burned cables were preferable to an ugly strain relief boot. The problems with Apple cables are easily prevented with a few inches of electrical tape or a couple of pieces of heatshrink tubing to provide a satisfactory level of strain relief.
I wonder if you had a counterfeit Magsafe adapter? They commonly get shipped with used Macbooks, and get quite a bit hotter than their genuine counterparts.
I have personally preferred the Magsafe adapters ever since I had a USB-C powered Macbook slide off my bed by accident. It didn't fall far, but it landed right on the power cable and damaged both the USB port and the cable.
Understandably, Macbooks are not designed to withstand any sort of drops, but I'm positive that the Magsafe of my 2015 MBP would have popped out, and the body of the PC would have been fine.
I never had any cords fray ever on any product I ever owned.
Except for basically every single Apple product I ever got that had one of those stupid white cords no matter how gently I treated it. I've never bought anything Apple related from somewhere other than Apple and have been buying Apple products since the first iPod with the physical moveable wheel.
I think within the last few years they finally changed how they made the cords. My replacement Apple brick for my Macbook pro still looks filthy after a couple years of use, but has surprisingly not started fraying.
Almost half of my Apple cords are frayed, in the same spot, right next to their poor excuse for strain relief. Apple has a chronic problem with proper strain relief, and seem unwilling to fix it. Every other cord manufacturer on Earth has solved this problem with designs like this: [1]. Why Apple won't follow suit is beyond me. Maybe the appearance of it offends the sensitivities of one of their ID artists.
> "Why do you attribute fraying and/or blackening of the cable to the connector at the end?"
It was at the point where the cable meets the connector that the fraying problem occurred. I suspect that because of the nature of MagSafe, many people tended to pull on the cable to remove it rather than actually grip the connector, which contributed to the problem.
But the real flaw with MagSafe (other than it being proprietary) was that the cable was permanently attached to the power brick. At least with USB-C, if the cable fails, you can just replace the cable - not the entire power supply!
I'm not comparing platonic ideals of connectors, I'm talking about the actual physical product that shipped. Magsafe was a proprietary connector attached to a fixed, non-removable cable. That cable had noted flaws.
Whereas USB-C is a standard connector on a removable cable.
Probably because it happened at where the connector joined.
I, too, miss magsafe. I, too, believe that the newer USB-C cables are better engineered, and like the fact that I can replace the cable separately from the adapter if there's ever a problem with it.
> I found the Magsafe adapter cords would fray, corrode, and blacken pretty easily, becoming a fire hazard. Every Macbook I owned, I would need at least one replacement over a 3 year period.
My Magsafe power supply is a decade old, and except for being dirty has no problems.
You've repeated it a couple of times in this thread, and this doesn't hold up.
1. The cord is standard plastic sheathing: how does that fray?
2. Are you in a damp atmosphere for it to corrode?
3. You don't qualify what "blackening" is. Do you mean become dirty, or burnt?
1. See sibling posters. The plastic sheathing would split, and eventually splay. Electrical tape was the solution many used.
2. North America?
3. Burnt, i.e. the cable would turn brown at the edges connecting to the power supply or the Magsafe adapter.
I'm glad your power supply still works. This situation is sort of like the new MBP Keyboard: I've never had a problem with it, but many have. With the older power supplies, I've gone through at least three replacements over 10 years of MagSafe, not counting the new ones I received with new laptops. Much less expensive and time consuming than the keyboard so not as big a deal.
My point is that the Magsafe power adapters weren't this shining beacon of perfect design. They had flaws in practice, and USB-C has so far corrected those flaws (and introduced its own tradeoffs).
Steve Jobs used to constantly claim that Mac’s RISC processors were much faster than Intel, until the day Mac adopted Intel, then without blinking he said they are now much faster and never looked back.
That is salesmanship on a large scale. I thought Steve Jobs was the king of spin (ie convincing people of bullshit) until I saw Donald Trump run for President, and realized that you unlock a whole other level when you do this:
Well the G3 when it shipped it was pretty competitive if not faster, the G4 still was pretty good in some benchmarks but the Intel / AMD post Athlon fight broke loose by then so by the time Apple switched to the Core architecture they were pretty far behind in performance unless you were using 2 or 3 hand picked Photoshop filters all day.
I believe this was also an attempt to address the fraying problem and make the MagSafe cables/connectors last longer. By decreasing the tension needed to release it, it would reduce stress on the cable.
I get the warm and fuzzy feeling USB-C gives nerds, cause of the open standard and interoperability, and cause it only takes one attempt to actually plug it in; but I just cannot fathom how Apple replaced Magsafe with USB-C.
Magsafe was one of those magical Apple features from the mid 2000s that just delight and work incredibly well and almost seem like science fiction. It's not like they had shitty power adapters and USB-C was an upgrade. It was the Hofmeister Kink of Apple computers, and they got rid of it. I just do not understand at all.
You don't understand because you haven't shifted your mindset about Apple correctly. As a former Apple fan I was the same way.
Apple under Tim Cook is motivated by shareholder value, not usability or design leadership, as they were under Steve Jobs.
They got rid of Magsafe and the rest of the useful ports and added USB-C not because of the warm and fuzzy feeling it gives nerds, but because it streamlines factory production and makes the laptop thinner.
At some point Cook decided to shift their decision making from being driven by the power user's needs to being driven by the shareholder and average consumer (which is motivated more by marketing flourishes like thinner laptops and the Touch Bar than usability). Shareholders would likely applaud that.
The point is that Apple is more Microsoft than Apple these days and we should shift our expectations as such.
> They got rid of Magsafe and the rest of the useful ports and added USB-C not because of the warm and fuzzy feeling it gives nerds, but because it streamlines factory production and makes the laptop thinner.
A “former apple fan” should surely remember the hand-wringing over the iMac USB switch too. And Lightning?
Apple has always pushed almost-there technologies with benefits over legacy tech, this isn’t about “shareholder value”.
Sure, I remember ... The disabling of Flash and removal of CD drives, ethernet ports and headphone jacks are good examples too. I still have the dongles I bought for my Powerbook.
But up until now it hasn't been a unilateral replacement of all ports with just one type. The dongle I bought was an adapter for one port and one use-case. I didn't have to buy a new adapter for every peripheral I owned.
Ultimately if Apple had included a portable docking-station-like adapter that had HDMI and a few USB-not-C ports along with the laptop purchase I would be OK.
They got rid of Magsafe and the rest of the useful ports and added USB-C not because of the warm and fuzzy feeling it gives nerds, but because it streamlines factory production and makes the laptop thinner.
Except for the “make things thinner part”, there was the same complaint about the original iMac when they got rid of all of their ports and went USB all the way. The Macs before then had serial, ADB, and SCSI - and of course the floppy.
Magsafe adapters had quality issues. My company is all-Mac (3000 employees now), and you'd not believe the turnover of Magsafe power adapters frayed, blackened, corroding.
They got rid of magsafe because it's a lot less useful in a world of 8+ hour battery life. I generally don't plug in my laptop except for at my desk and/or at night.
> Moving back to older USB ports really would make no sense. They're obsolete.
I sure wish I could join you in the year 2030 where USB-C is everywhere, but unfortunately I’m stuck here in 2019 and USB-A is still the de-facto standard on just about everything.
It’s nice to design a product to be forward-looking and adopting standards early when it’s foreseeable that they will soon become big. Like the Mac mini 2018, with its 4x USB-C and 2x USB-A. Got the future ports, but also the still-current ports. Awesome! But designing a product with USB-C only, for a future that is many years away, is pretty stupid, it just makes the product inferior and inconvenient in the here-and-now.
You can get USB-C monitors, external hard drives, most modern phones connect via USB-C. What else do you need? Bluetooth fills in the gaps for things like external keyboards and mice and most modern printers can be connected to via wifi.
I appreciate my needs/requirements are not everyones but USB-C isn't exactly elusive these days.
Sure, if I throw away all the USB-A things I have and start over now... but that would be quite a waste.
Also, try to find a true USB-C hub. With that I mean a box with one upstream USB-C input and several (>= 3) USB-C downstream ports. As far as I can tell, such products still do not exist. There are many USB-C-docks with USB-C input, various other downstream ports, and sometimes an additional USB-C port which is power-delivery-only, with no data connection.
I have only found one such product at all, but it fits the description just barely: Belkin has a USB-C-hub, but with only 2 USB-C downstream ports, and only supporting 5Gbps and no Alt-DP-Mode on any of the ports.
When I looked into the issue of USB-C hubs some time ago, all I could find is this claim in a blog article [0] that suitable chips for such USB-C-hubs are not available:
> Update (2018-07-30): Accidental Tech Podcast reports on a rumor that next year Intel will finally ship the chip that’s needed for making a USB-C that adds additional type-C ports.
I just bought a brand new (released 2019) wireless Logitech mouse. Wireless dongle and charging cable are USB-A
I just bought a brand new (released 2019) audio interface, connects with USB-A
In fact, besides my recent 2018 external SSD which came with an interchangeable USB-A/C port, none of my newer devices are USB-C
So, this is more like... I've got my VCR and a DVD player, and all the new movies are only coming out on VHS
Edit: I'll add to this - it's also frustrating not having any other ports on the MBP as well. I recently had surgery and was bedridden for a while, and the nest of cables I needed for ethernet, HDMI, mouse, etc.. was insane. Normally it's not a huge deal, but there's a lot of factors that have been making me regret not getting a Razer Blade when I was deciding between the two.
I get your point, and at some point in the future I’m sure USB-C will prevail. My point is that we’re not there yet, and right now, having at least one old-fashioned USB-A port on a laptop is just useful.
Right now, it’s like throwing out your VCR and all VHS movies when DVD just came on the market and there’s barely any movies released on DVD yet. Did anybody with a sizeable VHS collection throw them away the day DVD arrived?
It’s too soon for “USB-C only” - at least for me - it would mean constant need for all kinds of dongles.
I bought a USB-C to alighting adapter for my phone, got USB-C Sony wireless headphones, and a couple USB-C adapters for my regular USB 3 devices. Kept all my Thunderbolt peripherals (bought a TB2->3 adapter), and a hub and a video adapter or two (HDMI and Display Port)
$200 later I’m happy but when I use my old 2013 MBP I feel kind of slighted.
You can buy cheap cables with USB-C on one end, and USB-A, USB-B, Display Port, mini-DP/Thunderbolt, HDMI, Lightning, mini/micro-USB, etc. on the other end. No need to change devices, just get new cables. There are even tiny little adapters that fit on the end of your existing cables; you’ll hardly notice them.
You cant keep everyone happy and I personally love having 4 USB-c ports, with any one of them supporting power to the mac adapter (with any 3rd party cable).
I have an external UCB-C 1TB M.2 and last night it transferred an entire 50gb directory of movies in <1-2 minutes to my MacBook Pro.
Amazon sells USB-A to USB-C converters that’s the size of a tip of an old USB-A and they work great. I have 4 of them and use them less and less as more of my external products are USB-C. The 3rd party parts market always responds in kind, just don't be a first year adopter and you'll be fine.
I have used a converter like the one you are linking to, but they damage easily, instead I recommend one with a bit of wire, like the ones Anker sells: https://www.anker.com/products/variant/powerline-usbc-to-usb... (they are also available on Amazon).
I agree that the laptop is great. Personally I love the USB-C ports and don't miss the magsafe. I bought plenty of cables for all my devices (i.e. usb-c to micro usb) so I'm not caught in dongle hell. The only reason I miss the USB-A port is I can't find a wireless mouse with a low-profile USB-C wifi adapter. Bluetooth mice kinda suck and the ones that do exist have annoyingly large adapters right now.
That keyboard though, nearly ruins everything, I can't stand it. This is both the absolute best and absolute worst laptop I've ever owned.
I do have a bluetooth mouse although it's not a Logitech. It works ok. I wouldn't recommend it to anybody but it gets the job done.
Maybe I should give a Logitech BT mouse a try. I've been holding out waiting for Logitech to release a mouse with a USB-C adapter but they don't seem to want my money.
Obsolete was an exaggeration. "In sunset", perhaps?
PS/2 mice and keyboards shipped for many years after USB. I expect USB-A will be around for a long time even though most of us will have moved on to USB-C.
The vast majority of USB accessories are still USB-A. Big manufacturers still use USB-A for everything. For example Logitech still has no USB-C mice or keyboard AFAIK.
The truth is that USB-C has seen a very slow adoption outside the mobile world.
If USB-C adoption surpasses USB-A in a couple more years it will make sense to call it "in sunset", but IMO that doesn't make much sense today.
The wireless keyboards and touchpads have a Lightning-to-USB-A cord, which can be plugged into the computer directly. Primarily for charging, but if you charge off the computer it'll use the wire instead of Bluetooth for typing.
Do you know of any PC keyboards/mice that do this? I want to be able to do things in the BIOS so having a Bluetooth keyboard that charges and is functional over a mini USB adaptor would be really useful. Same with a mouse, Bluetooth is not always great but a mouse that did both wired and wireless would be neat.
Even if this is only used once every six months when something goes wrong it would be nice to have. I prefer to use the same keyboard/mouse combo for all machines. Just having that full flexibility helps.
Not saying it wasn't useful for you, but I've literally never once used my SD Card reader. Having the option for putting it in would be nice for customers like you, but I'm happy it's not there for my laptop.
Yeah it totally depends on your workflow. If you do a lot of photography (I do Drone photography) you need an SD-Card reader to get the raw images off of your drone. I have a dongle so it's no big deal, but I would love to have a micro-sd card slot in my MBP. It's the only dongle I use regularly.
Apart from the OS, hardware wise there are quite a few laptops that are better pound-for-pound.
The XPS and Huawei MatebookX pro seem to be better in every way, with the polish that is expected of Apple products.
Think pads cater to a different market, but have all the same bells and whistles too.
The XPS and Thinkpads have great linux support, so it helps bridge the OS downsides to a certain extent.
The XPS 15 looks fantastic in theory. Great ports, high resolution, Linux support, there's even an Intel-only Precision model so I wouldn't have to deal with Nvidia drivers.
But every time the XPS line is refreshed, people confirm that there are still issues with coil whine. It baffles me that this issue hasn't been fixed in all these years.
For years I've been buying "Snuglets" and using them on my magsafe connectors to make them more secure. http://www.snuglet.com/ They are a cool little product making the cable less easy to pull out but still able to come out if pulled a bit harder. On probably a total of eight or more Macbooks over the years I've never had the cable pull the jack too hard or have the cable break. Highly recommended...
Honestly I think the touchbar is for Apple’s original constituents: creatives. I don’t use it when doing software development, but it’s amazing when I’m going through scuba movies. I can scrub through videos to get the perfect frame for my subject, which is especially nice since I have one of a creature none of my friends can identify. Only through scrubbing did I catch that two frames revealed a distinctive blue sheen on part of its black bands under a dive light.
USB-C is awesome. I can reuse all my 3rd party and Apple adapters for my USB-C peripherals, including tablets and the Nintendo Switch. In retrospect, Magsafe wasn't that great (comes off too easily). Moving back to older USB ports really would make no sense. They're obsolete. If you have older peripherals, get the dongles. We've been using dongles since the VGA/DVI days or Serial/USB days, so I really don't get the problem with them. Life moves on.
I have a need for HDMI and VGA and Mini DisplayPort and old USB... not to mention lightning. MUCH rather would have a single standard of multi-port w/ dongles than a mess of fixed ports.
Also, on what planet did anyone have a Magsafe cord over 2m? It was fixed to the adapter. The 2m usb-c cable is removable, add it with the 1m (edit: 2m!) power cable and it is a further reach than any prior Mac laptop adapter I've had, though I suppose third party ones exist.