All the other brands went along

I miss having a thousand different cables to keep track of /s

really, all we need is the companies to start packing those laptops with thunderbolt3 or equivalent USB-C (USB 4). I love the old ports, but they were unnecessary. I'd rather the industry finally takes on the open thunderbolt standard and we're all good to go. With 10 thunderbolt ports you have 10 HDMI, or 10 USB, or 10 Ethernet, or 10 headphone jacks, or 10 RJ45 or whatever you need + PCIe tunneling.

Useless old school holes? I am glad they did.

And there's the soldered RAM and storage, and glued-in or screwed-in battery...

As someone who daily drives a laptop for work and does field work on server facilities, finding a modern replacement that has both a RJ45 port and square USB (USB-A?) ports available on both sides, has been a pain in the hassle.

And I'm not even crying over the loss of VGA any longer. That one I can live without.

I'm no Apple fanboy (never owned a product of theirs and never will) but to be fair, those two USB-C ports can do everything the old, removed ports can do and more. The real crime here is not putting enough of them on the laptop.

Edit: The only port I'll lament the removal of is the headphone jack. USB-C headphones are rare, adapters get lost, and bluetooth headphones compress the audio and have input lag. Everything else can go, though, and won't be missed. (Okay fine ethernet can stay too.)

The new (not that new anymore) macbook PROs do have separate DC input, HDMI, SD card slot and HDMI. And to be honest, for an average computer user those ports are pretty useless, however if you do need them it comes at a rather steep premium.

Yes, they should totally bring back the firewire port!

They remove the extra ports because they take up space in the board.

That aside if you’re buying Mac you took it from yourself. No one made you buy it.

Problem: This is what happens when you pick Apple.

I actually prefer the standardization here. Sick of having 2 boxes of different cords.

The 2nd from top has two lightning sparks. To charge the laptop, I have to connect them to the two holes in my outlet, right?

I dont know why this is controversial. I'm way more happy with 4x USB-C, than 5 unique ports, that will likely never be used on a regular basis, even when they were relevant

This pic leaves out the latest generation of MacBook that brings back some of those ports.

I guess OP would rather generate outrage upvotes, rather than spread the truth.

I believe that the topmost (M1?) MacBook still has a headphone Jack on the other (right-hand) side.

PS: by no means am I an apple fanboy, but I inherited an old Retina MacBook Pro that I installed Linux on and now use as my daily driver. It still holds up extremely well considering it's 11 years old. The only ports it's really missing is an RJ45 and (nowadays) USB-C.

Not Lenovo, my ThinkPad P1 has lots of nice ports

Dude, those two little UBS-C ports do 50x what the ports on the bottom laptop could do

I'm on the other side wishing peripherals would catch up and all become USB-C already. I'm tired of USB-A.

USB-C does a lot of heavy lifting. Also, MagSafe™ is still there. A little surprised there is also a SD card slot. And a HDMI port. Not complaining about their inclusion, and I do use them regularly, but why did the dongle company give these to us?

Fuck firewire. Glad it's dead. USB C is the best thing to happen to peripherals since the mouse.

I’m glad I can plug in one port and have a dual display setup, all peripherals, speakers, ethernet, charging, etc connected at my desk in one go.

If I want to leave, unplug one thing and I’m good to go.

And look how much thinner. A large part of that is the need for physical ports which although they may loom small on the outside, also take up space inside for the boards that convert signals. Now those conversions happen in the dongles if needed.

The real problem is that USB didn't implement a hub standard so most hubs have had to use old hub standards and just have a single USB-C connector and the rest USB-A, hdmi, etc. There haven't been many purely USB-C to USB-C hubs to allow for connecting lots of USB-C devices to a single port and usually they end up losing features or splitting bandwidth instead of sharing the full bandwidth.

Just one port to rule them all

This is my ~8 month old work laptop.

Is a Dell.

2 usb c not pictured.

You have options.

I dunno - I’m pretty sure I’d choose the modern MacBook Pro’s ports over any of these other options.

The annoying thing is they're not even that much thinner. They've just reshaped the edge to make it look like there isn't room for real ports.

As long as a computer has 4 usb-c ports, I think you’re covered for everything.

Yes we had more different ports back in the days, but most were never used.

Usb-c is way more practical. Still that implies that you have more than 2 Usb-c ports.

Is this rage bait? Those are different macbooks. I think the bottom ones are pros. My current Pro M2 has HDMI and magsafe. My M1 (Air?) is like the top one, but is not in fact a pro and therefore does not provide as many ports.

USB-C is awesome though. I carry one charger amd dongle for HDMI and ethernet. It serves my many devices including Steam Deck, phone and laptop.

That's what happens when designers boss engineers around. Form over function is pure cancer and it's becoming pervasive in our civilization due to the overwhelming ubiquity of propaganda(marketing). I have nothing but contempt for these trends.

To be fair, USB-C, especially with Thunderbolt, is much more universal. There are adapters for pretty much every "legacy" port out there so if you really need FireWire you can have it, but it's clear why FireWire isn't built into the laptop itself anymore.

The top MacBook Pro is also the 2016+ pre Apple Silicon chassis (that was also used with M chips, but sort of as a leftover), while the newer MacBook Pro chassis at least brought back HDMI and an SD card reader (and MagSafe as a dedicated charging port, although USB-C still works fine for that).

Considering modern "docking" solutions only need a single USB-C/Thunderbolt cable for everything, these additional ports only matter when on the go. HDMI comes in handy for presentations for example.

I'd love to see at least a single USB-A port on the MacBook Pro, but that's likely never coming back. USB-C to A adapters exist though, so it's not a huge deal. Ethernet can be handy as well, but most use cases for that are docked anyway.

I like the Framework concept the most, also "only" 4 ports (on the 13" at least, plus a built-in combo jack), but using adapter cards you can configure it to whatever you need at that point in time and the cards slide into the chassis instead of sticking out like dongles would. I usually go for one USB-C/Thunderbolt on either side (so charging works on either side), a single USB-A and video out in the form of DisplayPort or HDMI. Sometimes I swap the video out (that also works via USB-C obviously) for Ethernet, even though the Ethernet card sticks out. For a (retro) LAN party, I used 1 USB-C, USB-A (with a 4-port hub for wired peripherals), DisplayPort and Ethernet.

I'm good with it to be honest. One port that can do it all. Not proprietary.

The longer we keep including legacy ports the longer they'll stick around on peripheral devices

Manufactures won't change until forced. The transition period might be a bit painful, but worth it.

Not all. If I dont get 2 USB-A ports, I ain't buying. Fortunately thinkpads still have them

I don't see the problem. Type-C ports can replace all those ports. If you want more ports, buy a dock.

WTF is this boomer facebook post shit?

All the other brands went along

(My 2020 G14 has 3 A ports and ethernet, but still...)

It’s your fault if you buy it

<--->

Oh yes, the port that HTML passes through

Where is the removable battery? Did ANY Apple laptops have that?

The pursuit of the "perfect body."

we need 7 firewire ports and micro dvi ports with 1 mini usb

ThinkPad gang laughing in redundant tf ports

All the people saying buy a dongle are forgetting to mention that dongles stop working all the fucking time. It's yet another potential point of failure that stops ALL work dead in its tracks if it happens.

Buy dongles and splitter dongles.

I love it personally. At work I have two monitors, networking, mouse and keyboard all going through one port. So much easier in my opinion.

Asus G16 2023 has 2 USB-A, 2 USB-C (one of them supports Thunderbolt), Ethernet, HDMI, 3.5 mm jack, and a micro-SD slot.

Dude if you need that many ports just buy a P50 workstation

All you need is a couple of USB-C ports and maybe a HDMI port on most modern laptops. More is good but not a requirement.

well… the new one has gained some ports back, also usb c is absolutely OP (if you have the money for the Accessories lel)

Wow is that firewire? Haven't seen that in a while

Even Lenovo is doing it with Thinkpads, the t14 gen 6 has soldiered ram and only two USB A ports

I am happy that things have converged over time to a single, truly versatile multi-bus capable port (USB-C/Thunderbolt 3) ... however, the vendors IMHO should be legally bound to supply down-converters for all the peripherals that used the older buses for the next 10 years, transitively for 2 generations of buses.

If USB-C supports bus 'X', then there should be inexpensive and easy to purchase down-converters from USB-C to 'X'. If Bus 'X' replaced bus 'Y' in the last 10 years then there should be a down-converter available from bus 'X' to 'Y'.

One problematic example is Firewire.. Apple used to make Thunderbolt-2-to-Firewire800 dongles, but they stopped and now they're rare as hens' teeth and ungodly-expensive.

They still sell Thunderbolt-3-to-2 dongles, but how long will they keep selling those?

Oh, and while I'm wishing for ponies, the drivers/specifications for all such adapters should be open-source and royalty-free.

Back in the ‘90’s, they had every port you could imagine, and some STILL felt the need to use a docking station. You really can’t please everyone. I actually like the streamlined setup more these days. Because I’d rather have ports I actually use and that are fairly standardised, as opposed to a bunch of others that are of no use.

I never used most of the ports on my 90’s laptops. Never used a parallel port, PS2, never used the PCMCIA card slot, etc.

All I really need is a full sized HDMI, a few USB-C’s and one or two A’s for convenience.

I'm not very tech savy but for years I wondered if I could somehow cram a desktop computer in an aluminium suit case. The challenge is getting to the point I will just take it.

Do the bottom two have the same charging port? Impossible!

Also, my first time seeing the newer FireWire and whatever the video output is...

If it doesn't have a VGA port, I don't use it.

Most things are wireless these days. I only actively use two ports: one for monitor + charging, and another for the second monitor. Mouse, keyboard and headphones are via Bluetooth.

For me the top one works fine for my day to day use. And it takes up less space in my backpack.

Honestly for some specific use cases where the computer being very light is needed, this is great, but the fact every mac has this now is a little crazy.

My brand new ThinkPad P14s Gen 5 has HDMI, two USB-A 5Gbps ports, a headset jack, a half-height Ethernet port, as well as two thunderbolt 4 ports and an optional smartcard reader.

I agree that Apple kinda inadvertently ruined the port selection on many laptops for a while but it's gotten better over the years; even Apple brought back HDMI and SD-Card readers.

As long as the bare necessities is available e.g 14" with HDMI, 2 Type C with PD and DP Alt, MicroSD/SD card reader, smart card reader(?), 2 USB A 3.1, 1x 3.5mm jack, 1x ethernet port, kensington and easy maintenance, for me it's enough. VGA connectors (dang those older projectors) can be handled with VGA to HDMI adapter.

My daily device is T14 G1 AMD with dualbooting separate SSD (M.2 WWAN slot used as SSD).

It looks like you're just a dumb follower.

Nobody took anything FROM you. You're just a blind consumer, fool.

Yeah, but at least they permit you to use the right mouse button.

That's what I mean when I say that Apple is the worst even ever happened to technology.

Where's the magsafe ?