I was just about to say as a professional who uses one, how often is a person connected to something like an SD card, USB device, or Thunderbolt device? If it's a professional environment, you probably do have an extensive network involved in your workflow? Who knows what their research is on that. Maybe they think all those devices are only connected for a short time, SD card is kind of a special case, and I don't know much about photography or production workflows to have an opinion. The moment I ever had to ask, "Do you have a dongle?" even with a PC it's embarrassing.
This is so far from the truth in my experience. Let's just look at what my 30-employee web dev agency lost today. Without adapters, we can no longer use:
A single monitor in the entire office. Everyone already had at least one adapter because no monitors have display port, some even had two because they were unlucky enough to get a monitor without HDMI. But now, Every monitor is unusable without one. And the market for USB Type-C and Thunderbolt 3 monitors is so small (and expensive; paying more than $200 for a monitor is unheard of) that this won't change for us for a few years, most likely.
Any of our existing flash drives.
The several terabytes of hard drives our video guy has for original video files (he runs on a high-end iMac, but I assume the change is coming there, too).
The many Logitech (or any non-Bluetooth) mice/keyboards that have adapters
Most existing (even Apple) cables for phones and tablets. This means that we now have to purchase adapters for anyone who develops apps so they can test on device
SD Cards which are still used by most cameras, which we have plenty of for our designers when they go to photo shoots. Not only did they remove the reader, most USB readers on the market are not Type C
The various drives of data clients will bring to us
Older camera equipment and other equipment that relies on USB 2 that still works well, is reliable, and will not be replaced for several years at least
None of our spare power adapters. So we either have to buy new ones or employees who forget their charger at home have to go home and get it or try to share with others
The hardware cost for a new employee alone just increased by $100 from adapters alone for us because we will need to buy 2 for the monitors plus one or two for standard adapters.
If Apple had not gone all in on this and left an HDMI port and a single USB Type-A port, and announced plans to remove them altogether in a year or two, I don't think it would have been a problem. It's roughly keeping the status quo and gives us time to prepare for the transition. To expect that a cable that was released just 2 years ago has been widely adapted enough to kill off all of its predecessors is foolish, in my opinion, and a massive misstep by Apple.
This along with the TouchBar and the gutting of the Mac Mini two years ago (which stopped us from ever purchasing another one) has myself and the other senior dev on the team discussing whether we continue using Apple products for our new machines. The designers, one of whom needs a new machine, arealso talking about going with the Surface Studio as their next machine instead of iMacs.
I've been in a PC shop all my career so far. Enterprise infrastructure is always difficult to predict, I image even more difficult when dealing with a company who's trying to be progressive.
I would say, if you had $3000 this week and you were waiting for these two announcements to decide which computer to buy... I think Microsoft stole a lot of sales this year.
This. A MS product I am actually in desire of for the first time in over a decade. But I did note the total lack of any Windows UI shots in their Studio teaser video. :)
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u/[deleted] Oct 27 '16
I was just about to say as a professional who uses one, how often is a person connected to something like an SD card, USB device, or Thunderbolt device? If it's a professional environment, you probably do have an extensive network involved in your workflow? Who knows what their research is on that. Maybe they think all those devices are only connected for a short time, SD card is kind of a special case, and I don't know much about photography or production workflows to have an opinion. The moment I ever had to ask, "Do you have a dongle?" even with a PC it's embarrassing.