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Damn you TSA – the 16gig NewMacbook Pro limit is about battery capacity?
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[Oliver Peters] “Funny. An SD slot wasn’t cumbersome in the last version of the MBP. The truth is that Apple sees photography as only the iPhone, therefore no need for an SD slot. It’s also nice to know that the 3.5mm headphone jack defines professionals. “
Exactly right. This is nothing like eliminating the optical drive years ago. In that case it was obvious optical media would be declining, the drive mechanism itself took up a huge amount of internal space.
With high-megapixel cameras like the Sony A7RII, Canon 5DS and Nikon D810, SD is by far the best way to transfer thousands of raw stills. My doc team uses only the fastest available high-capacity SD cards — not because the camera needs them but because they transfer faster to the laptop. The newest, fastest cards have a 150 megabyte/sec read rate. There is no wireless camera transfer protocol that can remotely match that.
There is a valid argument this is a pro scenario and most people don’t need that. But a $4300 15″ MacBook PRO is not something most casual users would purchase.
Re Schiller’s statement about camera wireless transfer being “very useful” vs the SD slot being “cumbersome” — for who? An SD slot is definitely not cumbersome for the pro users it would benefit. He apparently means Apple’s designers view it as *aesthetically* cumbersome. That is a topsy-turvy view of things. These products should be practically designed for the end user — not for the personal gratification of a multi-millionaire designer who envisions his product on a little satin pillow illuminated by a spotlight.
What’s “cumbersome” is current camera wireless transfer techniques. By contrast an SD card slot in an expensive Pro laptop is “useful”.
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The comment from Schiller about Pro’s needing the 3.5 mm jack because they have all these audio gear is even more bitter knowing that Optical Audio was removed from the jack… which is what some of those same pro’s were using.
https://www.macrumors.com/2016/11/04/new-macbook-pro-models-lack-optical-audio-out/
And then there is the news about the new ports on the Macbook Pro’s not being compatible with some Thunderbolt 3 devices…
https://www.macrumors.com/2016/11/03/new-macbook-pros-thunderbolt-3-compatibility/Happy about the FCPX update, but the laptops… Not so much. And I live in Europe, and Apple’s prices have been getting *really* expensive the last 2 years, and this Macbook Pro confirms it x10. A couple of years ago if you wanted to buy a NEW model 15″ MBP, base price was 1800 euros. Now it’s 2700 euros, BASE price, without your 5 dongles that you have to buy or the extra power chord that doesn’t come with it anymore. The prices are getting insane.
https://mathieughekiere.wordpress.com
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[Joe Marler] “What’s “cumbersome” is current camera wireless transfer techniques. By contrast an SD card slot in an expensive Pro laptop is “useful”.”
This is classic Apple-think to me. When they get things right, it’s because they think big. When they get things wrong, it’s because they think small.
It’s conceivable to me that not one person there has ever tried to transfer even as few as1000 pictures with a couple of movies off an SD card. To THEM, that probably sounds insanely high. To ME, it sounds like a moderately busy weekend, and I don’t even do this for a living.
The “thinking small” part is that wireless transfer is designed for doing a couple of pictures at a time to a phone so you can post to Instagram, or to a laptop or tablet so that you can do whatever — real Photoshop, put into a story, post to a company website, etc.
For all I know, the guys in charge maybe just HEARD about that, saw a demo, and said, that’s great. Problem solved….without seeing that welp, actually, it’s kind of a PITA for even a couple of pictures, but for anything big, it’s nowhere near ready to replace an SD card just from a workflow standpoint, much less talking about speed.
I’ve never been an Apple doesn’t love pros guy, and frankly, keeping the 3.5mm headphone jack on the MBP shows that they DO get pros LOL — at least some pros, for some things…but this apparently random dropping of features and interfaces is the kind of thing that drives people nuts…
….including yes, even some X’s most enthusiastically outspoken proponents NOW, who had to wait for 3rd parties to fill in the features Apple dropped.
Which, noting again, I personally called a feature, not a bug. I want Apple dropping MORE features, and MORE third parties to have opportunities…
…but with physical interfaces, this just becomes another THING to carry. Unlike some of the other adapters you’ll need for the new MBP, at least the SD card-USB C adapter actually exists, and looks pretty badass:
But really, that makes a solid half-dozen adapters, cables, etc. that most pros will have to carry.
Of course, one thing that Apple knows about pros. They carry BAGS. Just throw one more thing in the bag, right? No big deal. Problem solved.
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I prefer to install whatever port I need with a drill. It is a bit of work to do but gets the job done. ?
Just could not resist making this reply. ??
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[Tim Wilson] “But really, that makes a solid half-dozen adapters, cables, etc. that most pros will have to carry.”
The nice thing about Thunderbolt is that it can be anything, and is not a point to point system. An SD card reader is only an SD card reader, it does nothing more.
Conceivably, someone could make an adapter with everything on it, including power adapters, and then you throw one extra box in your bag and away you go. That box is now your power adapter AND connection hub.
I have Thunderbolt breakout boxes on almost every computer we have. It allows me to put the ports where I want, regardless of where the computer is, or what it’s in, or how accessible it is. Sure, on the surface, it seems like Apple is cheating customers, but in practice, having an extendable cable that can turn in to nearly every single connection or port you could want is not a bad thing. Yes, you have to buy another object. So what.
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[Jeremy Garchow] “Sure, on the surface, it seems like Apple is cheating customers, but in practice, having an extendable cable that can turn in to nearly every single connection or port you could want is not a bad thing”
I agree, but unfortunately Apple only gave us 4 ports (and if you get the 13″ model only 2 of the ports are full speed). On the previous gen model you had 4 ports for I/O, a power port, an SD card slot, and audio in. Plug in a monitor, external storage and power (which you’ll want since you are running a second monitor and external storage) and you have 1 USB-C port free. This thing should come with 6 USB-C ports, not 4.
It’s not the dropping of legacy ports that bugs me, it’s the reduction of functionality in conjunction with the dropping of legacy ports (and the 16gig RAM limit, and the older CPU, and the lower-end AMD GPU and the removal of the optical audio out…) that bugs me. For a flagship machine that comes with a price hike it’s pretty a ‘meh’ package, IMO.
EDIT:
Just saw that Apple has applied some hefty price cuts to the all the USB-C dongles they sell as well as the 4k and 5k LG monitors they announced along side the new MBP. -
[Andrew Kimery] “For a flagship machine that comes with a price hike it’s pretty a ‘meh’ package, IMO.”
Exactly. I have no idea how I said that it seemed like a bad idea to me to remove the SD slot could become interpreted as saying that Apple is cheating its customers.
[Andrew Kimery] “Just saw that Apple has applied some hefty price cuts to the all the USB-C dongles they sell as well as the 4k and 5k LG monitors they announced along side the new MBP.”
The monitor cuts are nice. The dongle cuts are essential. Not that their engineering choices on the MBP are on the same order as their decision to ship the iPhone 4 with what they knew to be a faulty antenna (their reasoning: nobody uses an iPhone for phone calls) and needing to issue $1.5 billion worth of free cases/bumpers to forestall a recall….
….but I do think it reflects an awareness that the overwhelming reaction to the MBP is “To make this work with other Apple products, I have to buy WHAT?”
Because that really is the thing for me. Apple makes their choices for whatever reasons, that’s life — but this time it feels like they didn’t even look at their own product line before making these choices, or didn’t care about things like some of the connectors necessary to make these Apple products fit together aren’t even on the market yet. Did they think we wouldn’t notice?
That’s not cheating. It’s just….weak.
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I think you may be misunderstanding,
If you a one box that’s full of dongles AND power, you will have three Ports left plus the daisy chain, so four total. Haven’t lost anything.
I have two Thunderbolt 2 ports on my laptop now, as long as everything has a pass through, I am not short ports.
For instance, we have TB2 monitors on our MacPros that have passthough, , usb3, and audio ports (as well as HDMI and DisplayPort in), so at the monitor, I can add drives, more monitors, and speakers.
So what capability have I lost, and how many ports am I missing? If you get out of the mjnstate of one adapter per function, Thunderbolt is a boon, and since USB-C has the potential to power the laptop, that breakout box also becomes your power source. So tell me again, what is it that we are missing?
I am disappointed that the new laptop isn’t as powerful spec wise as we would have liked, and Apple made a choice to not make a bigger thicker laptop to use more power hungry processors to have 32GB of ram, but Thunderbolt3 is certainly not the bottleneck. As a matter of fact TB3 may allow external GPUs, then the game does change a bit but I’m getting ahead of myself.
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Obligatory:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-XSC_UG5_kU
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[Jeremy Garchow] “So what capability have I lost, and how many ports am I missing?”
Nobody said (or at least I didn’t say) that any ports were missing. No SD card is a big deal, though. Insurmountable? Of course not. I already posted a picture of a gorgeous adapter that was introduced in January when Apple dropped SD out of the Air.
No USB is kind of a drag, because of the millions of USB thumb drives I’ve been using over the years. Insurmountable? Of course not.
It becomes a bigger drag because the only wired connection on the cameras I currently own is….you guessed it…USB. Have I lost capability because I need a micro-USB to USB-C cable? No. But I’ve had to add a cable that I didn’t want to add, for no good reason.
If they kept the 3.5mm jack because audio pros need it, it’s not too big a stretch to imagine that they might have considered what photography pros need. But even more than video, photography pros have been upset with Apple for a while now.
The exasperating thing is just the extent to which Apple appears to not know what’s going on at Apple. So, they held the FCPX release to sync with the MBP? Fine. Great idea.
But did they not notice that the new iPhone was on the calendar for the same timeframe, and there’s no way to “natively” connect them without another cable or adapter? Well, I’m sure they did, but I guess they assume that pros don’t connect their phones to their computers, or that pros already have a pile of adapters on hand because of the pile of adapters it takes to use a Mac in the real world.
Actually, that latter is probably true. I’d imagine lots of people have USB C to Lightning cables already. But it certainly exposes the limitations of the Dream of A Single Cable for at least another generation of iPhones.
The other thing that struck me is, what was the biggest news out of the iPhone launch? No 3.5mm jack, right? I get that Apple might not have foreseen this, although I can’t imagine how they’d have missed it. But related to that, they announced the nifty AirBuds, right? (Okay, okay, Lightning EarPods, TERRIBLE name).
There’s currently no way to connect them to the new MBP. None. The current Lightning to 3.5mm adapter is misgendered for this setting. We’d need a female Lightning to 3.5mm audio plug or USB-C adapter, which doesn’t exist. Nbd, since pros don’t listen to music while they work, and if they do, they use the archaic but apparently intrinsically pro 3.5 mm jack.
NONE OF THIS IS HUGE. Please don’t accuse me of accusing Apple of cheating customers because of an uncharacteristically out-of-sync release. It’s just that. Nothing more, but in fact, also nothing less. This was not a great rollout.
(Unlike the FCPX rollout, which was FANTASTIC. ?)
You know what’s funny to me? If Microsoft had rolled out multiple new products in a short timeframe that were this far out of sync, presenting this range of conflicting messaging, Mac users would be laughing their asses off about the ineptitude of Microsoft, this is why we use Macs, etc etc etc.
Again, no big deal. We won’t be talking about any of this next year, any more than we talk about no optical drives in laptops anymore. But especially in the context of this thread, which started with the idea that Apple HAD to do things this way….when in fact that’s simply not true, it’s TOTALLY true that Apple didn’t HAVE to trip up.
They’re in charge of all the products. They could just as easily have made sure that the new iPhone could connect to the new MacBook Pro with the cables in the boxes, and at least had a connector for the new AirBuds in the store.
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