We got one for my wife back in december and after using it for 4 months I don’t think the lack of ports matter very much. That said, it would not have been very hard to put a second USB-C port right next to the one, then at least you could charge it and plug something else in at the same time without a hub/dongle.
But to your advice about waiting for the next model because Thunderbolt? Wha? I don’t get that. At all. You’re pretty much in the same place if you have one USB port or one Thunderbolt port, so why would you wait because of this? And, oh yeah - OWC’s thunderbolt hub costs $230 instead of $160…
This is like when someone complains the Nissan Leaf isn’t a real car only to be informed that they stopped making real cars in the 1970s anyway, so why don’t you drive off in your fancy little golf cart, princess.
Well, what constitutes a “real” keyboard then? I’ve generally been of the opinion that laptop keyboards in general failed to meet that metric. What would be an example of a laptop keyboard that didn’t measure up to this standard?
Well I go by size, as in horizontal and vertical. A big problem with a lot of laptop keyboards are 90% or smaller keyboards which cramp your fingers. I had a dell convertible a while back and it had that and it drove me crazy. I think that’s what Beschizza’s mentioning.
I don’t understand why the USB and SD ports on the iMac are on the back, along with the power switch. Its a terrible design, and apparently done to clean up the look of the front of the machine.
I have the OWC Thunderbolt 2 dock and love it with my MacBook Pro. I have it hooked to 4-5 (depending) USB-A/3.0 drives and occasionally an older FireWire drive. Plus two external monitors (one via Display port, the other HDMI). If I ever get Thunderbolt chassis, I’ll daisy chain that somewhere.
The whole plug-n-go aspect is nice. I had corporate Laptops with docking stations in the past and starting liking them. This is the same thing for the Mac, just using a cable instead of a custom contraption that specifies where your laptop must sit on the desk.
The USB-C dock requires another ethernet driver into the OS whereas the Thunderbolt Dock does not; strange.
I might be living in the old days, but I still love my Compaq nx6120.
It has IR port, 6in1 memory card slot, 3.5mm audio in/out jacks, 4xUSB ports, 9pin serial port, 25pin parallel port, VGA & S-video ports, RJ-11, RJ-45, 1394 port, 2xPC Card slots, MiniPCI slot, 2 RAM slots, socketed processor, optical drive bay (empty, but I can sot in my secondary hdd), docking connector, bluetooth, wifi.
I may have forgotten something… oh and it boots Linux Mint in 12s and shuts down in 4.
It even has a little fan inside that keeps it cool
All that in a 30mm thick package. It’s cost me a total of 100 euros and the only mods I have made is add an internal mic, remove the cells from the battery and a simple alteration to the optical bay to make my DVD burner/secondary drive/empty tray swappable.
How did it all go so backwards?
(Of course I’m living with IDE and USB 2.0, etc but that ain’t bad longevity for an 11 yr-old laptop).
(Oh yeah ,and it’s not an Apple machine, but that’s just the icing on the cake).
Well, if you plugged the adaptor into an outlet 30 cm off the floor, or, alternatively, a power strip lying on the floor, using the it as a usb hub would necessitate using rather long cords.
It’s only when you use a power out a study carrel (as in a college library), that this sort of makes sense.
power switches belong on the back of computers. The usb ports are a right pain if you want to use flash drives, though. SD card-- might have been better to put it the side. Always seem to be forgetting to take it out after transferring files. And when I do, some hours later, the computer has invariably remounted it since it was first “ejected.”
No thats terrible UI design. The hazard light switch in your car in on the dash board, high up and right between the driver and passenger, for good reason, so somebody can press it when required. You don’t have to reach under the dashboard and feel for it. Likewise, apple used to put the power switch on the keyboard. For me that was good design.
It sure was convenient - right up until the time my cat walked on my keyboard and shut my computer down (he managed to hit the power off button and the enter key to confirm the shut down). So, I’m gonna go with “bad design” on that one. Not so much for being on the keyboard, but for being too easy to press.
