lookWhatTheyTookFromUs
Wednesday, 12 Mar 2025
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They’ve reversed course. My new MacBook has MagSafe, SD card slot, and some more. Of course, it also means my new charging cable is the only one in the house.
I don’t need a thinner laptop. I need one that runs all day.
To be fair, I didn’t use most of those options.
So, this is a few years old? My one-year-old-macbook has magsafe, mini-audio-jack, hdmi, sd-card and 3 usb-c slots. The “only-usb-c” phase is gone.
Yeah because now one port can do all of those things, and we get thinner and cheaper laptops because of it. (Except for the Kensington lock port I guess)
Plus, I’m fairly positive that ALL MacBooks have headphone ports (except for one long-discontinued product line), it just moved to the right side in recent models, so the top image is misleading.
Edit: All recent pro models also have a SD card slot and HDMI port on the right side, plus a MagSafe port on the left, so this post is especially stupid
I got the top one for work and honestly I love it. Great device, portable even at 16″ size fits well in every bag I use and the connectability is more than sufficient for it’s tasks. Got a thunderboard dock at work and one at home and that’s it. Didn’t even once use any other port than usb-c even for charging.
I’m just happy I have my HDMI back
But the USBC does all of that and more [and is smaller]
Alternatively; look at the bullshit we used to have to deal with.
Let’s go through all these ports.
MagSafe – excellent charger design. Apple brought it back, I’m a little confused why they got rid of it but yeah it’s probably the best charging port of any device I own.
Ethernet – occasionally useful in the past, but with modern WiFi speeds I almost never use it, so no reason to have a dedicated port. Plus it’s really thick
DVI – good luck finding a monitor that accepts this
FireWire – good luck finding anything to even plug into this
USB A – I almost exclusively use this for external storage devices. There’s nothing especially wrong with type A, but type C is generally better and is widely supported these days. It’s a relatively thick port, so makes sense to cut it down for portability.
Mic – who even has a direct input mic that’s not USB
Headphones – should’ve never gotten rid of it on laptops, that made no sense. But they brought it back in the newer models so again they corrected
SD card – a little more niche, but still widely used, especially among typical Mac users. I sort of understand why they got rid of it, but again they brought it back in the end, which I’m glad
Mini DisplayPort – completely redundant with thunderbolt, and the ports are awful. 100% good decision to get rid of them.
I think that’s all of them. Overall I think Apple realized that making everyone go to USB C only was a bad idea. They still allow you to run basically the whole computer off USB C only, but you also have HDMI, SD, and MagSafe. Which I think is actually right about at the perfect set of ports.
I only feel sad for the HDMI, very good decision to bring it back om the latest Macbook pro.
Ah the good old days where we had 10 different standards for ports!!
Frankly speaking on a non professional laptop AND given the prevalence of bluetooth powered devices, you don’t need more than two ports. For the few that do, just get a port multiplier. I have a tiny port multiplier that I use as a docking station, it gives me two usb-c, one usb-a, and one hdmi and it’s more than enough.
But when that first one came out the internet was too busy being enraged that Apple had removed serial, parallel, VGA and ADB.
This is good. USB C was the dream.
I’m now left with 1/4 USB-C that still works. Never had a USB-A port stop working like that. Thing is, macbook is still fully working (late 2019, 8 core), but soon I won’t be able to charge it.
Getting rid of the magnetic charger port was a huge mistake.
People who want these ports back are not people I want determining what ports to have.
Honestly USBC is just the future. The problem being that we’re still not equipped adequately
I sure miss my FireWire port
FIRE WIRE
People yrarn for the holes 🕳️
More ports yes. Different ports no. I like the new standardized ports
I personally think Apple should have stuck to just having usb-c ports and a headphone jack. usb-c does everything and is going to be obsolete a lot later than all the other ports that are on the mac.
I was going to say that Framework also had a cool idea with their replaceable port modules, but those are literally just USB-C adapters that have special holes cut out for them
You can get one USB-C adapter that does all that.
And let’s be fair how many people ever plug headphones in anymore, I don’t remember the last time I used FireWire. WiFi is far more common than Ethernet when you’re using a laptop (and for work you can get a dock and plug Ethernet in there)
I’d much rather have less ports that do everything better
They took away the shit connectors and gave us the lord’s usb-c. Amen!
Sure, but those USB-C ports combine the functionality of most of those other ports. I just plug in my monitor to the USB-C port and it supplies power, external video (DisplayPort), and my various low bandwidth USB stuff.
The only real crime is Apple only supplied 2 total ports on a Macbook PRO. It should have had two on each side. Other than that, I’m quite happy with the original M1. It’s a nice machine.
And nothing of value was lost.
Remove the connectors, fine I guess. USB C adapters seem to mostly work as actual plug and play these days.
But keep the laptop the same thickness and fill that space with batteries! I want a laptop that can genuinely go all day long and then some.
Those ports can do everything all those other ports can do. When they brought them back in the M1, I legitimately don’t have enough ISB-C ports, which again can do all of the above. Like why do I need a huge HDMI port that is useless.
Bring back ports with screws to secure them! Also my back hurts!
if “they” is apple, sure. my laptop still has most of those ports….
I’ll only buy a laptop if it has all the options I want. If these are macs they never have the options i want, that goes for both hardware and software.
I have a MacBook Pro from 2016 with four of these bad boys and a headphone-jack. It’s still my workhorse, still works great (I replaced the battery) and I don’t miss a useless million ports.
Most of these are back. If you want to keep your 2017 mbp, gotta deal with the usb-c only situation.
Professional hardware has still all kinds of ports.
Not everybody is building “function follows form” devices.
Bluetooth made the headphone jack kinda useless, and it shows. They really didn’t care how badly it works (if it works) on my Dell.
I only need 2 USB c
r/extremelyinfuriating
I don’t mind every device starting to use usb-c. Helps with decluttering cables in my life but…
1. If you are removing slots because we have usb-c now, you need to put usb-c slot to make up for it. Remove 10 slots, give 2 usb-c slots is a fucking joke.
2. Removing the headphone jack slot is fucking awful. Whoever decided that it’d be a good idea to remove headphone jack, fuck you.
I didn’t refresh my MB during the all usb-c age.
I need the hdmi and SD card reader.
Still missing one classic usb to be perfect but the new arm chip makes for the inconvenient of carrying a dongle !
They want us to buy docks and use a single cable for power, display, network, keyboard, mouse – sort of convenient until you want to plug in other stuff while undocked. I made sure my new laptop has a few USB ports, audio, HDMI, ethernet etc anyway
My laptop still has a dvd player