SD card slot, HDMI port could return to the MacBook Pro this year, says Apple analyst This year's crop of MacBook Pro laptops are expected to include dedicated HDMI ports and an integrated SD card reader, says an analyst with the inside track on the twists and turns in Apple's roadmap. "We predict that Apple's two new MacBook Pro models in 2H21 will have several significant design and specification changes," …
It will be a very welcome change if Apple finally pulls it's collective head out long enough to realize that those ports are desperately needed.
I don't know a single techie that was fooled into believing the limited port selection was in any way superior to having dedicated ports for exceedingly common use cases like plugging in USB keys or an external monitor. This was a cash grab for overly pricey yet low quality dongles, and a significant hassle for the end users who were all but guaranteed to need one in order to connect with the outside world.
The shenanigans Apple pulled since 2016 was directly responsible for our company switching our policy from "Get an apple if you want one" to "You need to provide a business case to justify the purchase" because MBPs were so half-assed.
It's still frustrating that they soldered everything onto the board so you can't upgrade the ram or storage, but fixing the ports issue will at least solve some significant usability headaches that Apple needlessly forced upon it's customers.
It's a valid questions, would need to gather data on which cameras are actively being used today 'in the field', and which options they have for rapid photo transfer to a computer. I suspect that the high price and good build quality, plus investment in lenses, mean that many cameras in active use are older models that don't have WiFi (which would be suitable for some cases)
Low end photos: done on phone, usually transferred by cloud.
High end photos: bigger kit means camera bag, thus room for connection cable. Card not always SD type.
That's leaving SD cards in use in mid-range cameras, pocket type so not necessarily carrying bag with room for cables etc. A popular market segment. Used by vloggers, so spare SD cards useful (but then a bag for required spare batteries?). Still, the newer ones charge over USB, so connecting to computer by USB to transfer photos seems sensible.
TL;dr there are enough older cameras (of the type where the cable is proprietary and has been lost, don't have WiFi etc so using an SD card is easiest) still in use for an SD slot in a Mac to be useful for some users. At the same time, the low end of photography doesn't use SD cards at all, and more recent models of cameras have WiFi or standard cable ports such as USB C.
Unfortunately this sounds, err, too good to be true.
HDMI & SD card slot would be welcomed, and sounds plausible, especially since my 2019 MBP is the same thickness (seemingly at least) as my 2012 MBP. To go back to magsafe may be a bit far. I enjoy being able to charge everything with USB-C. To have a magsafe charger could be nice if maybe they can design a reliable version of those magnetic USB-C plugs you can get that apparently fail after a few weeks. I'd sacrifice one of the USB-C ports for a magsafe though to have the choice.
USB-A may be nice to have a single port for whatever, but really it's time things moved to USB-C. USB-C to A adapters cost next to nothing. For those legacy devices, you can buy one for each device and leave it permanently attached.
The touchbar I was a painful death on. Thankfully I at least got a real ESC key and the new 'old' keyboard. You never know, give it another 5 years and we'll be back to removable batteries!
"USB-A may be nice to have a single port for whatever, but really it's time things moved to USB-C. USB-C to A adapters cost next to nothing. For those legacy devices, you can buy one for each device and leave it permanently attached."
Perhaps, but most devices, including those sold nowadays, still use USB-A. I needed some flash drives recently. I bought USB-A ones. There were some USB-C only ones, which weren't going to work on anything older, and some with an A on one end and C on the other which were about five times as expensive. The same is going to be true of virtually every USB peripheral. Those that stay in one place can have dongles attached to them, but for a flash drive, the dongle will make the thing a lot longer and more prone to damage. Also, you just know it's the thing you will lose right before you need it.
I have no objection to USB-C as the universal client port that we should put on every device using USB to charge or receive data. I don't really mind if we eventually get USB-C as the universal host port, although we're going to have to find some way of indicating which direction we want the power and connection to go. Until we actually get that though, we're going to need USB-A ports, and more than one.
> HDMI & SD card slot would be welcomed, and sounds plausible, especially since my 2019 MBP is the same thickness (seemingly at least) as my 2012 MBP
I can see them adding a HDMI port.
SD card? Not so much - after all, what actually uses the original "postage stamp" SD card format these days?
They *might* include a micro-SD card slot, but even then, given that iOS devices don't support micro-SD cards (and in general, neither do high-end Android devices), I'm inclined to think they'll leave that off, in favour of people plugging their devices/card-readers in via USB...
It always struck me as incredibly wasteful to tie up a 40-gigabit Thunderbolt 3 / USB-C port just for charging the laptop (especially if you have only one or two).
A separate dedicated power port makes much more sense.
I've been sticking with my 2015 MBP, which has two TB2 ports, two USB-A ports, HDMI, SD card, Magsafe 2 charging, and 3.5mm audio: they all get used at various times.
The people for whom an SD card reader and HDMI/USB A ports (or a headphone jack, or an Ethernet port, or...) are of no concern are probably folk who would be quite happy just using an iPad (Pro) with keyboard accessory for their day to day activities. But those aren't really in the MacBook Pro audience, anyway.
The nice thing about having those dedicated ports is that you're not sending all that traffic over a single USB 3.2 ultra-fancy-superspeed X2.3^10 link, but using dedicated PCIe lanes. With cases like ingesting content from an SD card and sending it to a NAS via an Ethernet link while having two external displays connected, you'd go absolutely batty if you had to do all that via that single link using dongles.
For a 'Pro' system, that would be the kind of scenario that it should be able to handle, because that's roughly where a Lenovo Thinkpad T-series would end up. Of course, a P-series Thinkpad would probably eat a 'MacBook Pro' for lunch. What does 'Pro' mean any more these days?
Having switched over to the all USB-C not long after they came out, I slowly upgraded all my cables and dongles as I needed them. There's only a couple of things I still need dongles for, HDMI dongle, very occasionally to connect to a projector, but most displays support thunderbolt now. Some external HDs still need a dongle, but now I tend to buy stuff with USB-C anyway.
Even before the change, I was doing multi-media stuff, and connecting multiple displays to my laptop, so even 1 HDMI slot was not enough
> It's strange that a company which made a killing from the tagline "it just works" would make customers jump through so many hoops to use an external keyboard, or a second display
To be honest, it's a pretty straight-line extrapolation from that principle. After all, in much the same way as per Jeff Goldblum in the old advert, they were keeping things simple by having a single standard set of ports.
You can just see their designers and marketeers gushing about how having a set of simple oval (well, rounded rectangles) ports made for a clean and elegant design, as opposed to a mix of large ports of varying shapes with harsh right angles and visible electronic boards.
Of course, in the real world, "clean, elegant and simple" are often starkly in opposition to actually being useful. And that was the case for USB-C; great for hooking up to storage, somewhat useful for plugging in audio, and a nightmare for use with video, since all the workload gets shoved onto the laptop's CPU.
And it also means that the laptop's owner then has the responsibility for carrying around the cables and adapters to hook into non-Apple stuff. Which arguably, is their fault for not spending more money on Apple gear, anyhow...
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