This is actually quite sad. Up till this MBP release Phil was still "A link to Apple's True Mission Statement" to me. It pains me to not only listen, but to see the look in his eyes as he tries to defend the undefinable.
Phil does need to retire, for his personal health. At the very least a position where he is not forced to spoon feed disinformation. Phil has always been Phil. IMO, he is a good guy in a bad spot. Others on the Executive Team have no trouble at all lying to your face.
Ever wonder why you don't see Jony in the Product Videos any longer?
Huh? Let's look at this for a moment, Apple has always pushed the edges and usually toward proprietary connections, for example, they were the first or among the first to do all of the following (as far as I know):
- Used a proprietary monitor connection for a very long time that was incompatible with any other system or standard monitor
- Add firewire ports
- Add thunderbolt ports
- Remove the floppy drive
- Remove the DVD drive
- Use the 30-pin connector for iPod, iPhone, etc.
- Use the lightning connector
- Created a Magsafe connector which ensure that third party chargers could not be legally created since it would violate their patent. This also prevented the creation of external battery packs until someone got creative.
- Make their laptop battery not user changeable.
- Make an all in one PC (their first attempt was terrible, but they did it)
- Sell a computer with no mouse or keyboard
All of these changes were made under Jobs. Now Apple has decided to move to a non-proprietary port system of USB-C that will work with a wide variety of charger and accessories that are already available and people are complaining. And by the way you don't need a single dongle, you can get USB-C to anything else cables for far less than the cost of a dongle and simply replace your old cables.
As for the removal of the SD Card reader, let's take a better look at that:
On average people keep a Mac for 6-8 years, card reader technology improves at a rate of about every two years. This means that the built-in card reader ends up being 3-4 generations out of date by the end of the life of the mac, meaning you are using a card reader that is substantially slower than the latest card readers out there. So, this does mean that it makes sense to remove the card reader from the laptop, as it will encourage people to work with the latest and greatest. It also removed a point of failure that if built-in can cause excessive costs to repair.
Don't get me wrong, I don't think everything Apple does makes perfect sense, but this one does and it will push other manufactures to fully adopt the USB-C standard and push the accessory market forward, which in turn will push cell phone manufacturers to do the same and get back to a universal standard charger.
