Oh yeah and I can play things like Skyrim and Fallout.. I dunno, and enjoy a CPU that avoids Wine like an AA meeting

Someone at apple is really really really stupid.

Even though it's stupid (and a lie that doesn't apply for the iPhone 7), I can understand getting rid of the audio jack to make future phones thinner, because that's a metric phones compete on.

But getting rid of utility to make laptops ridiculously thin makes no sense at all. Weight and speed are what laptops sell on, not 2mm thickness differentials, so making them even thinner by gutting utility is pointless

True dat, Solro. We already have smart phones and tablets, if the present selection of laptops is too bulky for you then just stick to texting on your damn phone.
Apple sucks and it's customers are idiots.

Optical media on PC's has been deprecated for going on a decade now. It's absence at this point is a little like a new stereo that doesn't have a tape deck. It absolutely makes sense to me why they'd not include one. If you doubt how utterly useless they are, even microsoft now offers .iso downloads of their various OS's for free with a legit activation key.

Cheap flash and HDD media are better in every conceivable way on a computer with the capability to boot from USB, which is every computer manufactured after ~2005.

What's infuriating about the headphone thing (I would imagine, I'd never buy a computer or phone without a headphone jack) is that bluetooth audio still isn't that great. It can drop out, it's vulnerable to interference, playback now requires reliance on two sets of batteries, and it severely limits your choice in headphones.

They sell a dongle, but it's bulky as shit. Kinda defeats the purpose of shaving .2 mm from the thickness of your phone.

Apple are simply transitioning to an all-dongle business model.

Anyone who is interested in human-centric design and the usability (and more general) problems with the current status quo of minimalist, obfuscated interface design, should really take the trouble or expense of getting hold of this and reading it, it's very good and an easy read:

https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/living-complexity

Another point that is tangentially related and often overlooked is that accessing the internet over 3g/4g/whatever wireless networks is legally a different thing from accessing it over a wired network (your home wifi mostly counts since it's a wireless LAN with a wired connection to your ISP) and a lot of FCC and other regulations that apply to telephony (which wired internet legally counts as) don't apply to wireless access (which does not count as telephony). The net neutrality guidelines a few years back, for example, had a whole separate category for non-wired devices (i.e. phones with data plans) that was noticeably less restrictive and more favorable to ISPs, and that's just one example off the top of my head.

There are real regulation-avoidance incentives for companies to make it more difficult for end users to connect their devices directly or access the Internet from their device over a conventional wired network, and that accouts for some of the reduction in peripheral connectivity on home-use devices, too (and is most definitely part of why rooting devices is made so difficult).

Monkey, I was looking at the Bluetooth spec a few years back with the idea of getting Bluetooth headphones, but at the time it was literally impossible to get even close to CD quality audio (much less any kind of high definition audio) over Bluetooth, I forget what the specific details were but it was pretty limited. I understand they've updated it a bit since then but I have no idea if it's now technically possible to have audio over Bluetooth that's good enough for anything but phone calls and maybe podcast listening.

waahhh wahhh apple sucks waaaahhhh

When I buy a computer or any other technology I want more than I need, because my needs might change. When using my laptop as a portable recording studio I've filled every USB slot with the Reason ignition key, midi controller, recording interface, and wire less mouse. This laptop looks like a nightmare for anyone who wants to use it for anything beyond surfing the internet. This thing looks no more useful than a cheap Chromebook.

I did the same thing a couple years back OZ.

The headset I got actually had surprising good quality, but spotty connectivity that would lead to weird pitch-shifting during playback as the headset stretched out it's buffer slightly to accommodate dropped packets.

You bring up something I didn't mention before ( I forgot ) about audio quality problems that I know they didn't fix.

When you plug your headphones into a device, you're using it's onboard DAC. Even on a phone, a DAC can be pretty good, especially since it's integrated onto the board and can be engineered in a way that piggybacks some of it's function from other parts of the board.

Over bluetooth, you have to do conversion on the headset, which means it needs it's own DAC. Guess which component is garbage even on expensive headsets? "They" added some special modes to the protocol in order to simplify the hardware requirements of converters, but these were changes more tailored towards simplicity than quality.

I gave up on laptops entirely once my old Asus gave up the ghost. I went to a Mac Mini with three USB ports and two HDMIs and I honestly wouldn't have gotten it without those. The only real inconvenience I've had with it so far is that my old DVD based copy of Reason 2.5 would not work with the Mac Mini, even with an external CD/DVD drive, because the new OSX refuses to allow for CD or DVD based software. THis necessitated a $400 upgrade to Reason 9.

I like Reason 9, but frankly I was perfectly happy using Reason 2.5 forever, though now I have the ability to record vocals, which is nice.

Also, my iPod Nano's bluetooth system works just fine in my car and I haven't noticed any sound problems or lack of connectivity. It sounds just fine, at least as good as CD quality.

But then, I use three Apple devices just because of ease of flow from one to the next.

What are you talking about? Apple just wants to make the world a better place.

Yeah but more recently its gotten to the point where their shenanigans are genuinely entertaining to watch.

I work in software and have always been a window/linux head, whereas almost *all* of my co-workers have always used macs. Its fun to see them squirming now!

They have years of data showing the public will buy whatever they sell at about 50% profit. Fuck it, get rid of spacebars.