You are doing it wrong. I rarely have to do that and I have 2 monitors.
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If I recall, without looking it up the IIfx had a proprietary cardbus, proprietary serial ports, non standard RAM and the video cards options were very expensive. Still it was a nice machine.
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Yes, I admit I was going for all-or-nothing. Combining is a different matter. Given each input methods has pros and cons, I would still say it adds to cognitive friction though if you have to constantly decide which you want to use for what task.
Yeah they seriously need to move from lightning to USB C on the iPhone so that they can get rid of that damn headphone port on the MBP.
iPhone to New MBP - No
3.5mm Headphones to iPhone - No
3.5mm Headphones to New MBP - Yes
Lightning Headphones to iPhone - Yes
Lightning Headphones to New MBP - No
Great “family” of products Apple!
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The IIfx was a NuBus machine. Technically ‘standard’ (IEEE-1196); but the kind of ‘standard’ with such minimal marketshare that it just doesn’t matter. Yes, NuBus was doing cool stuff at MIT back when ISA was setting DIP switches and banging rocks together; but that had little impact on the eventual winner.
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Israel posted a picture of the IIx - a predecessor to the IIfx (also pronounced as 2-Fucking-eXpensive). I loved the dual floppies on those things, but you might as well have bought a Performa (identical hardware) those days and gotten some free software thrown in.
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I’ve heard that the IIfx was chock full of custom, non standard ASICs. It was designed, in part, to run AU/X and compete with workstations for government contracts
Ha! I just got out of art school back then! That thing could have had unicorn tears and magic beans on the inside for all I knew at the time.
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I posted the pic, and if memory serves I started with the IIx and upgraded to the IIfx.
They were probably terrible choices! It was in a medical illustration unit in a hospital, and there weren’t many people using Macs. I am guessing procurement just signed off on anything within budget, and my supervisor went with whatever the sales rep told them.
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People do complain about the USB type-C port replacing everything.
But consider this. You have (at least in the Macbook Pro 15" inch), four Thunderbolt 3 ports, running at 40 Gb/s, each.
How you use this capability is your business.
Want to run an SSD Raid? get the appropriate adapter.
Want to run 10Gb Ethernet? get the appropriate adapter.
Want to run a 5K external display? get the appropriate adapter.
Want to run a PCI video card? get the appropriate adapter.
Want to run scientific instrumentation? get the appropriate adapter.
Sure-- replicating what Apple provided in previous generations of laptops requires the purchase of a hub–perhaps an expensive hub. But many of those apple provided ports went unused.
My Imac 5K has the following ports:
Thunderbolt 2 Port-- used for an external DVI 1080p monitor.
Thunderbolt 2 Port-- unused
Gigabit ethernet-- unused
USB 1: scanner
USB 2: time machine hard drive
USB 3: media hard drive
USB 4: flash drive and or DLSR tethering and or TV Tuner.
SDCard reader: used to read today’s snapshots.
so maybe I need more USB ports. Maybe I would also like to use a PCI card cage for a video card, and am put off by nonstandard Thunderbolt 2 hacks and lack of market power…
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Haha, you got me 
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typically portable headphone jacks are 3.5 mm. The one shown is the one-fourth inch plug from my non portable headphones.
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That sounds a reasonable assumption to me as well. I’ve been running apple laptops since maybe 2004 and my own private high water mark was…Snow Leopard? Whichever OS X they essentially rewrote for security/stability/efficiency without adding a shitload of (what I often consider to be) silly bells and whistles. The underlying OS was faster, even on older machines, and it wasn’t burdened with useless cruft.
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I just can’t even imagine using that much.
Well, yes. Still, I rarely top out 10 GB.
I am painting ever larger canvases in CC these days (and hundreds of layers), but even so.
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I don’t know about faster (and it did kind of crash a lot more than Leopard—at least for me), but yeah. Mountain Lion started this inevitable grind we all live with now.
Our 4GB Core2Duo mac mini server is glacially slow at the desktop these days.
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I’ve actually noticed it happening more recently because I’m working on responsive web layouts. This often involves taking a file with a lot of layers, extending it vertically sometimes thousands of pixels, and then moving all the layers at once.
This seems to be a particularly RAM intensive operation, and used to bring my workstation to a crawl.
It was enough of an issue for me to get an upgrade to 32GB, and that’s fixed it for my situation.
YMMV.
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Yep. I admit I don’t use Photoshop for any web work, just painting.
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@robulus & @coherent_light this is why it would be great to have some additional options/choices, as well as upgradability for key components like ram. 
we don’t all have the same needs, and those needs might just change at some point within the life cycle of our ownership of a well built computer.
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I get it.
Back in the day, we scraped together as much memory as we could afford. Then later, as much as we could fit (the maximum—or more!). If we still needed more, we swiveled or waited until we could use desktop or deskside machines. We used to be clever and work around limitations, which honestly included software itself more often than the hardware we used. We were still pretty productive!
But now, you can basically buy a pro laptop and max it out, and that’s going to be good enough for almost everything. Now, if you need to run a yuuuge character matrix to produce a cladogram based on all known taxa, you can probably start with a laptop, finish on a cluster (I’m actually just guessing this example would actually eat RAM like there’s no tomorrow).
I can literally fire up two linux virtual boxes, Illustrator/Photoshop Creative Cloud, LW3D (all I have are small scenes), be logged into two accounts and bunch of other stuff and barely notice it (well, maybe a little more than barely). On a Mac laptop. And still get maybe a bit less than four hours of battery life. I’m not saying that’s typical, I’m just saying I can.
And an SSD makes the time it takes to get in and out of large apps nearly moot (although I think that Photoshop 4.0 on my PowerBook 1400c is still faster to load than Photoshop 2016.5, but I grumbly digress).
Crazy. Yesterday’s big iron is today’s portable aluminum.
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