“While rumors of a 12-inch MacBook Air have been merrily percolating these last few months, the most interesting aspect of Apple’s upcoming redesign turns out not to be the size after all,” Brian Barrett reports for Gizmodo. “It’s the apparent abandonment of ports.”
“Where there was once (on the 13-inch MBA) a home for a MagSafe connector, Thunderbolt, SDXC card slot, a headphone jack, and two USB 3.0 ports, the 12-inch MBA has a lone USB Type-C (a reversible version that can also be used for charging) port and an obligatory headphone jack,” Barrett reports. “Instead of hardware connectivity, presumably, you’ll be expected to use a smorgasbord of cloud and wireless connectivity.”
“This seems dramatic, but should it actually come to pass it’s also perfectly fine and good and probably foreshadowed. Apple spent the last year introducing features specifically designed to let you circumvent wires altogether,” Barrett reports. “Handoff, to let you move seamlessly between computer and phone. iCloud Drive, for cloud-based file storage. AirDrop, which has been around even longer, to let you share files among Apple devices with ease. It’s already entirely possible to go weeks without having to hook up your MBA to anything besides the wall.”
“So, sure, sounds good. Except! Except,” Barrett reports. “While on paper the transition to a nearly portless world seems perfectly fine, there’s nothing in Apple’s recent history that suggests it’s ready to put so much weight on its cloud and software offerings.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Lately, when it comes to software and services, Apple needs to do better.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Dan K.” for the heads up.]
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Apple’s next major Mac revealed: Meet the radically new 12-inch MacBook Air – January 6, 2015
Open letter to Tim Cook: Apple needs to do better – January 5, 2015
this reminds me of those old netbooks. is apple trying to sneak a netbook into their lineup? i thought steve jobs hated them?
I found the performance and connectivity of recent MBA good enough for my medium duty photo editing on the road.
I don’t think this will suffice.
I guess this will push MBA back into more of a boutique/niche position, and less mainstream. And push more people into MB Pro’s.
Wow. These opinions are reminiscent of the noise made when Apple introduced the iMac with no 3.5″ disc drive or when they stopped using FireWire or when they introduced Macs without optical drives or when they discontinued the iPod mini. Everybody pretty much agreed Apple was doomed.
DOOMED.
firewire was/is so awesome. I don’t trust the NSA cloud, and my neighbour (possible professional hacker) is very sneaky at spoofing even my own hidden wireless network (I hear you can get an android app to do that). Apple’s faith in wireless misplaced may be, as is their faith in big government contracts (which probably comes with NSA meddling).
he probably is watching your desktop and/or has a key logger installed on your mac. maybe you should to a wired setup and stay away from wifi?
im sure you’re right, which is my point, that last bit of your advice.
I think thats your neighbour speaking.
It’s not a matter of Apple being DOOMED or not.
It’s a matter of having too little ports.
Not being able to charge and use an external drive at the same time? That’s moronic.
Why review an actual product when you can review an artisit’s concept instead?
First World Computer hard wired to the NSA via cloud dependence.
Exactly! Slavery is freedom. Judging by the rating, I guess people hate to admit that their conveniences come at a cost.
As long as apple products have glare-ey glass cover, i will not but one. I have 200 mac minis at my office but will never have an iMac, for this reason. Samsung monitors for me.
Uhm, newest iMacs come with a matte option.
no ports make trouble shooting and problem solving of computers nearly impossible.
then you need new training
It will (or should) at least have one MORE small physical port. A Thunderbolt 2 port, which takes care of the need for almost every other type of port.
Ugh. I want a laptop with at least 2 USB ports, and thunderbolt and the memory card reader. I don’t want yet another frigging cable type to worry about forgetting. And I never thought I’d say this, but I think it’s thin enough. Give it more battery and put the normal ports on it.
That’s the MB Pro. The Air is supposed to emphasize thin and light for max portability.
Portability and versatility are not mutually exclusive.
The Macbook Pro is about as thick as the standard USB and thunderbolt ports on its side. It’s clearly the right form factor, if you want both versatility and portability in a laptop. Can you explain how the Macbok Pro could be more portable, without sacrificing its versatility?
I have the 15″ rMBP and 11″ MBA, huge difference in weight and portability. I also have a full sized iPad. If I had to make a decision between the MBA and iPad, I’d drop the portless iPad like a hot coal. That’s the whole problem with iOS devices, you have to jump through hoops (a.k.a. Spend lots of money) to get around the lack of ports. I don’t need another money sink just to save a few tenths of an inch and a few ounces.
When WiFi gets as fast as USB 3.0, or better yet Thunderbolt 2, then we’ll have the speeds to make portless operation viable, until then it’ll just be a hardship.
You should realize by now that Apple doesn’t do normal. If you want normal then you should buy any other company’s products. If it were feasible, Apple would quickly do away with all standard ports on their portable devices.
If this is a semi-accurate render of the new MBA it may well be the “iPad pro”, where we’re not supposed to think of it as a Macbook Air that’s *lost* a bunch of ports, but an iPad that’s *gained* 2 inches of screen, a keyboard (detachable?), and a USB-Type C port.
It’s a new USB standard that will ultimately replace (hopefully) the horrid mess of multiple USB interconnects, so it’s possible to see a future with only one cable required.
Apple were the first to adopt USB, drop floppy discs, and everyone whined about it; same thing here.
Airdrop seems to work ok for me. Handoff is far less reliable. Seems to show up… whenever it feels like.
This is in part due to the flakiness of wifi in Yosemite.
ATTN APPLE: I do NOT want to deal with cloud and wireless connectivity!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
I,definitely, will get one. I’m simply tired dealing with all the messy wires around !!!
Yet another stupid rumor. Thunderbolt is also the video port and almost every peripheral under the sun plugs into USB to either charge or run. ITunes even has trouble syncing over WiFi and not everyone has a time capsule for backups or even cares that much for Time Machine to use it for backups. And then we can get into the security issues caused by going completely wireless. As I said, just another stupid rumor.
I remember reading somewhere that little bits of information, especially about radical changes, are disseminated slowly to see what people think of it, before the final product is released. This looks like one of those slow deliberate leaks.
Musicians may not find the lack of hard wired connectivity appealing. And as Steve showed once during one of his classic presentations, a room filled with wifi tethering can lead to some unfortunate consequences.
The more people on MDN say “wow, revolutionary etc.,” the greater the chance that we will see this product. Not so sure that’s a good thing.
I just don’t get the panic. People, these are rumors! Anyway, the MBA is supposed to be light and portable, so if you need all those other ports, there will be adapters that let you connect power, video, multiple USB, Ethernet etc. to whatever ports are ultimately designed into the device. This way, you carry with you only what you need. Please, don’t worry- they’re not idiots and they’ve been doing this for a LONG time…
Assuming this might be true, let’s hope Apple will provide a nice little connect-a-thon dongle with this, providing normal USB, thunderbolt, and ethernet connections. Please, Apple, not a bunch of separate items….
Agreed. Otherwise you could get a chromebook for a lot less money
I’m skeptical about this. Seems like they would not give up on MagSafe for power. That and one thunderbolt port. They are smaller and more versatile. You could plug in an adapter if you need a USB port (becoming more rare these days) or you could plug into a dock and get a full suite of ports. You could plug into a monitor and get usb and other ports out. Seems more versatile and reliable than what is described here.
Have you seen the Thunderbolt adapters available? They’re about 10 times the cost of a USB hub, the size of a portable hard drive and use an external power brick.
Apple is infamous for dropping ports and dropping like floppy and optical drives, but the ports have always been replaced by better ones and the dropped hardware always were available as external devices which require ports. A thunderbolt spinning disk HDD with NO daisy chain connector is easily $100 more than a similar sized USB drive and runs at the same speed.
Until WiFi is fast, secure and reliable enough the situation may change, but currently Apple can’t even figure out how to get the OS to recognize my iPhone in order to sync reliably more than 20% of the time.
Portlesss computers are inevitable, just not anytime soon.
Regarding magsafe, who’s to say they won’t switch over to the induction charging technology they developed for the iWatch?
I have an iPad and need to use an apple accessory to get pictures from my camera SD card onto it. And its a pain in the ass to keep track of its whereabouts. It has taken such a long time to get SD card readers built in to Macs lets not abandon portable usability for the sake of 0.2mm in one direction or another.