I’m not faulting Apple for the existence of dongles; I’m faulting them for choosing dongles over standards in the interest of “design,” when in fact this aesthetic approach actually yields something uglier in total.
To be sure, choosing proprietary connections in the past was a certain type of externalized cost, but as a teaching model, the Apple example works really well for reasons both visual and visceral – a handwaving argument about proprietary ports in the wild-west days of laptops doesn’t really have the same oomph.
nice try but the bold parts, you are basically trying to discount the quite recent example regarding video ports as if it was meaningless. Also about half of them don’t have an ethernet port. But one can always get a USB ethernet adapter, right?
I don’t disagree with your statement that dongles are problematic and have been around for a long time and are generally kind of a shitshow. But I’m making a metaphor about externalized costs specifically, and I’m picking on the new Macbook Pro because the disparity between aesthetic design of the object in and of itself, and the aesthetic design of the device in use, is so great. If design aesthetics is value and ugliness the corresponding cost, Apple has palpably externalized costs in the interest of maximizing local value, yielding an apparent net benefit when considered locally but (arguably) a net cost when externalities are considered.
I’m not sure why this rubs you the wrong way, but hey. I just thought it was a nifty, and relatively clear, way to communicate a threshold concept from economics.
(As far as my own experience with laptops, I’ve never happened to own one that required a dongle for anything I typically use it for – including video connections and ethernet – but that’s neither here nor there. I also don’t give a lot of weight to aesthetic sensibilities when I choose a laptop.)
Yeah, but you have to carry that thick monstrous thing everywhere. I mean, what’s that? Eight millimeters? Pshaw. The iPhone X is a svelte 7.7 millimeters. That’s way better and totally worth being without a 3.5mm audio jack which nobody uses, anyway.
I just sent back a pair of se215m+. Didn’t read the description properly, the remote does only work on iPhones. I loved their sound, the se215 was on my list for a long time. But I need a remote for practicality (i.e., convenience of not having to fumble out my device to rewind every time I get interrupted by someone or something).
I just ordered a pair of WH-1000X2’s. Going to send them back, I guess. But at least I wanted to try. I threw several devices to the floor, and once from a three-storey building because I’m an idiot who gets entangled in cables. My dream is a great-sounding, waterproof, long-running headset with a great UI, and being comfortable, of course.sigh Not going to happen.
I’m anti-thin electronics, have been for decades.
In high school, I had a beautifully thin Sharp calculator with an aluminum body that snapped in half as I sat down with it in my back pocket. The fabric of my pants bent the device around my hard ass.
Now I wish I’d taken a picture of that bag! I took it all over the country. I had Cabletron and Cisco console adapters, punchdown to phone jack adapters (krone blocks and 66 blocks) , HP and DEC adapters for MMJs and harnonica ports, 9 and 25 pin pasthrus with LEDs on the lines that lit up different colors, null modems in 9 and 25 pin, much more. I actually carried tools to repin connectors as required.
That bag bulked more than the laptop bag, and weighed about the same.
