[sarreph]

I knew what laptop Marco would be talking about before I clicked on the link. Perhaps that says something about Marco, but I have the feeling it's almost certainly about how widely-lauded the old rMBP was, and still clearly is.

Apple got so many things right with it, because all the design choices made sense, for exactly the reasons Marco gives.

The design choices being made at the top of Apple no longer make sense. Take the touch-bar, for example; it was a passable idea, but flawed in execution and production. If you want another example, how about DongleGate™? The most recent USB-C trend was not handled the way Apple used to handle standards progressions. Yes, they annoyed us in the past with too many FireWire ports, and an overly-futureproofed candy drop iMac (USB)... But even then, those choices made sense because the rest of the ecosystem was thought about. This is clear when you compare it to today's offering, where you cannot plug a new iPhone into a new MacBook, out of the box! Incredible...

[isoskeles]

I thought "DongleGate" refers to that incident at PyCon in 2013 where someone made a bad joke about "dongles" within earshot of a woman who became offended. She took a photo of them, posted it on social media, and got them fired, and then she got fired for getting them fired.

[xauronx]

My eye started twitching just thinking about that one.

[tritium]

DongleGate™ arguably started (and was likely internally fomented) with this edition of the MacBook Pro.

This was the first MacBook Pro to exclude an ethernet port, and when Desktop Support at my company handed it to me, I looked at it and asked them what the fuck was I supposed to do about it? They shrugged, threw up their hands and left (I was the prima donna that asked for the Mac, figure it out asshole), and so I limped along on guest wi-fi for a week, until figuring out that I had to buy a dongle if I wanted to use wired ethernet. Eventually snagged some from desktop IT services too, but initially, they were callous and indifferent to my plight.

If anything seeing the statistics for the successful sales of this model and related essential dongle accessories, despite knee-capping ethernet, and forcing dongle adoption to replace an old, standard, widely reliable and convenient data bus standard, could only have inspired and emboldened choices like the headphone jack debacle and USB-C minimalism which still plague us even today.

[simonh]

DongleGate is a real thing, I'm actually putting off getting a new MPB until I get my head around what I can and cannot use different USB-C connectors for, but honestly dropping wired ethernet along with the optical drive was the right thing to do.

There has to be a balance between features on the device and the number of people that will end up ever using them. Hardly anyone uses wired ethernet these days, so expecting the tiny percentage that do (most of whom are probably on HN knowing my luck) to use a dongle is a justifiable decision.

The USB-C debacle is not justifiable. It's a stupid, necessary mess that will affect almost everybody at some point or other.

[JHonaker]

Hardly anyone at home, maybe. I still plug my desktop into wired at home, and the vast majority of computers at work have wired dock stations that work so much better than the WiFi in the building.

I don’t think you can honestly say hardly anyone uses wired Ethernet.

[sincerely]

I'd put money on 90%+ of desktops being wired, but in the context of laptops, it's a pretty reasonable statement to make.

[tritium]

  Hardly anyone uses wired ethernet...

Au contraire! Anyone familiar with wi-fi security knows better than to trust the flimsy authentication protocols, and even flimsier application layer implemntation of the user interfaces that control and behave as lock and key for the (more difficult to crack) actual encryption that protects the traffic itself.

Wireless communication is often attacked at the joints, by targeting the login handshakes that relay the password-oriented auth tokens back and forth, when confirming access. These side channel attacks on encryption are more likely to succeed than trying to capture a terabyte of traffic, in order to crack the encryption itself.

Anyone tasked with the technical aspects of handling millions of dollars securely, is likely to be avoidant of wi-fi for some select activities, where convenience is not the priority. If you know you're a spear phishing target, there are certain things you don't do over wi-fi.

[rtpg]

It obviously depends on your use-case, but in my case I have the LG monitor recommended for the MPB.

This monitor serves as a secondary display, a laptop charger, _and_ a USB-C hub. I ended up throwing a USB hub on my desk connected to the monitor for keyboard + mouse.

When I get to my desk, I plug in one cable to the computer and everything works. I know that ThinkPad people have had this sort of stuff for ages, but it's much nicer than my old workflow of magsafe + display port + USB setup.

[avn2109]

The late 2014 rMBP's were the last of the good ones. After that they put the stupid "force touch" trackpads in them, which have slightly but perceptibly worse mechanical response to being clicked. I still miss my 2014's trackpad all the time.

[alexozer]

I don't know, the force-touch pad is maybe my favorite hardware feature of my 2015 MBP (my first Mac actually). Being able to use the same amount of force to click regardless of finger position is really something.

[geetfun]

I really loved the 2012-2015 line of MBPs. I didn't have a 15 inch, but the 13 inch one. It'll always be my favourite as it's the perfect balance between size/portability/power/style.

[NovaS1X]

Agreed. My dream is a 13" with a quad-core CPU and TB3. With e-gpus progressing they way there are with TB3, my laptop is very close to replacing my desktop as well.

[devdad]

I had to get a new MBP really quick, and didn't know about the USB-C. I couldn't even use it for work since none of the monitors (one Thunderbolt, one would HDMI) would plug in, my iPhone used for dev didn't fit and and my USB-keyboard was a mismatch. Such a poor implementation.