Personally I'm glad to see MagSafe go away if that means I can use charging ports on either sides of the laptop. Sitting on the right side of the bed with the charger connected is a huge hassle when you only have a charging port on the left side.
The cables of Apple's MagSafe charger are also quite crappy, they tend to fray after 2-3 years of use. I hope that gets better with USB-C and if not at least you'll have better third-party chargers available.
Yes, this is something that I absolutely love about the Chromebook Pixel. Having two fully functional type c ports on both the left and right side of the laptop offers an unexpectedly amazing degree of convenience. The ability to daisy-chain several devices for charging is pretty cool as well. I'm never going back to a laptop that doesn't offer charging ports on both sides of the computer.
While I don't disagree with the annoyance as to laying things on the left side, magsafe is more nice in that if you hit the cable or accidentally have torque on the charging cable it just disconnects, not causes a ton of pcb or connector damage.
I've bought 4 of 5 of these goddamned Magsafe1 to Magsafe2 adapters, and they ALL fail over (a very short amount of) time. Sorta non-sequiter, but god it's terrible.
With what you've spent in adapters by now, you could have bought an actual M2 brick. Just sayin' ;)
(In 4 years I had to buy two bricks. Those thin cables are shocking. Still, Magsafe is such a nice connector, I wish they were all like that... instead of these large phallic daggers that will inevitably break their precariously-soldered ports.)
I won't argue that it might be the best thing about a Mac, but at the same time it isn't a great feature. They get dirty way too often and will lose contact, the size difference between old and new always bites me (my wife has the older size), and I've never seen a time where it saved my laptop (and I have four crazy kids running around and work remotely some).
It doesn't apply to a lot of people, but I have a mobility disability that makes plugging into ports difficult or impossible without getting someone to help. With MagSafe I really appreciate just lining up the cable imprecisely and letting magnetism do the rest.
There was a Kickstarter a while back for a Magsafe-like solution for USB-C. You might want to check it out if you haven't seen it already. Wish I remembered the name...
I like it, but leaving a dongle there all the time is dangerous, so you'll end up taking it out and back in every time, defeating much of the convenience. Still good for safety though.
The size change was really unfortunate, that has been a pain in the butt. But other than that, I disagree. I find magsafe works great and has saved my laptop many times.
It has always been unreliable for me. On multiple macbooks and adapters. Sometimes it does not light up at all. Sometimes lights up faintly. No major issues (just detach and re attach) but not as good as the physical grip of a USB port. Maybe I've been unlucky.
Edit: Reading other comments, I guess I was lucky.
Well, depending if these new macs use the USB-C port for charging _and_ regular USB usage, another laptop with a standard non-magsafe charging port could actually be more optimal for some/most.
I'm voting with my wallet by not buying the headphone-jack-less iPhone 7, but I don't think enough people will care about the lack of MagSafe. It doesn't prevent you from doing anything, and with everything going SSD (i.e. no data loss if dropped) it's probably easier for Apple to just offer an AppleCare replacement policy if the products do get damaged by being yanked to the floor.
There's already a USB-C charging laptop from Apple and that does not have any DRM in it...I highly doubt they'd do the same for chargers for the rest of the family.
I'm about as heavily invested in MagSafe as a single person can semi-reasonably be, but I have pretty strongly mixed feelings about dropping MagSafe, so when I hear that people are upset (and I admittedly presume that those individual people can't possibly be more deeply invested in continuing with MagSafe than I am (although I make no claims about people making decisions for groups of people, like IT staff)), I see an opportunity to point out that there's at least some merit to this. I want to be clear upfront that I'm not saying it's a landslide in favor of Type C, but that there is at worst a silver lining and perhaps at best this is a net win.
First, it's a good thing that we're converging on a standard. Standards mean not only that we can safely buy components from third parties (for instance, buying reputable, reliable USB Type C cables from places like Monoprice or whomever), but that we can borrow charging cables from others relatively easily. We've had a taste of that thanks to MagSafe's ubiquity, but a USB-based spec potentially broadens that.
Second, USB battery packs (admittedly a slightly niche product category, but one that's been growing rapidly in the past few years) could potentially be made to charge Macbook Pros now. There are some battery packs out there that support MagSafe today, but my sense from shopping around every few months is that the best option continues to be to buy a battery pack that has a standard electrical outlet, and carrying that big bulky MagSafe AC adapter with me. Transitioning to a USB spec (should) permanently open the door to portable battery packs, third party AC adapters, etc...
Third, USB power hubs (again a slightly niche product category, depending on whom you ask) can consolidate all of the AC adapter functions that devices need for charging. I'm already nearly there --- my tablet, battery pack, bike lights, phone, and watch all charge by USB (heck, I have a charger for my DSLR's batteries that uses Micro USB), and a single AC adapter for those devices is both tidier and easier to pack and travel with.
I agree that MagSafe's really nice and I'll be sad to see some of the benefits go, but particularly with MagSafe 2 they've overcorrected in my opinion by making the threshold strength necessary to break away too low, and it's caused me to seriously reconsider whether the frustration of all these inadvertent disconnections is worth the benefit. I see at least a few reasons to be glad that the next laptop I buy (maybe in a year, certainly in three) will probably be able to charge via the same (reasonably priced!) AC adapters and battery packs that I'll own for my peripherals, and that if I'm really up a creek it'll be more likely that I find someone with a compatible charging cable, since USB is (and will continue to be) pretty much ubiquitous.
Apple doesn't like to charge my iPad "Air" as quickly as it can with a Monoprice charger. It even puts a nastygram on the screen when you connect the iPad to the charger.
That does trouble me a bit, but if they stick to the spec (and I assume the retina Macbook hasn't deviated in any way to suggest they will for future models), then I see no reason not to remain tentatively optimistic.
I don't see any reason to go off spec given that they should be able to go up to 100W, but I may be wrong. Or Apple might come up with some hazy excuse for why the existing standard was no good. It'd be a real shame, though.
USB-C to USB-A dongle, then USB-A to Ethernet dongle.
Or like the fanboys on the Apple subreddit have pointed out, "who the hell uses wires in 2016". Not sure if certain people are complete apologists or simply out of touch with the real world.
Eight or nine years ago, I conceived a plan that I was going to have CAT-5 run through my house someday, once I found someone to do it. Here it is 2016, I have trade workers throughout my house doing a renovation and I won't bother. I'm not sure why I'm going to the trouble of bringing indoors the twisted pairs of the phone jacks so I can use POTS from every room. Everything I have, as a 57-yo fuddy-duddy, is wireless.
Conversely, we're planning on rewiring a 1950s house and shielded Cat6 is definitely in the requirements.
Once a family start using wireless devices, even on two channels ( one each on 2.5 and 5 GHz ) the throughput drops dramatically. On more than one occasion I've been found sitting on the stairs near the router with a cable plugged into my laptop...