So Apple had their big event this past Monday, the "Spring Forward" one, and by now you've read about seventeen posts about the Apple Watch pricing (its $349 to start, up past ten grand if you want the gold Edition one, which, come on). I'm not going to rehash that. What I can't stop thinking about instead is the new 12-inch MacBook. Not the Air, not the Pro, just "MacBook," like Apple reached back into 2006 and grabbed the name off a shelf.
Here's the thing that's actually bugging me: it has one port. One. A single USB-C connector that has to handle charging, data transfer, and video output, all through the same little reversible slot. No MagSafe. No regular USB-A. No SD card reader. Just the one hole, plus a headphone jack because apparently even Apple wasn't ready to take that away yet in 2015.
I get the appeal on paper. Thinner, lighter, no fan at all because it's running an Intel Core M chip that sips power instead of gulping it. Gold, space gray, or silver, starting at $1299, shipping next month. The keyboard's got this new butterfly mechanism under the keys instead of the usual scissor switches, and the trackpad is Force Touch, so it doesn't actually click, it just simulates a click with a haptic motor. That's genuinely clever engineering and I don't want to pretend otherwise.
But I've got a 2011 MacBook Air sitting on my desk right now (yes, this blog and that laptop are basically the same age, make of that what you will) and it has two USB ports, a Thunderbolt port, and an SD slot, and I use every single one of those regularly. Photos off my camera. A backup drive. Charging my phone off the laptop when I'm out and the wall outlet situation is bad. With this new MacBook you'd need a dongle, or more realistically a little hub, just to plug in a flash drive while charging. Somebody's going to make a fortune selling $79 USB-C multiport adapters to people who bought a $1299 laptop and can't plug in a mouse.
I keep seeing people online say "this is the future, everything will be wireless or cloud-based eventually, stop clinging to ports," and sure, maybe in five years that's true. It is not true in March of 2015. Half the printers in my apartment building's shared office still want a wired connection. My external monitor at my old job used a Mini DisplayPort cable that is now, once again, a dongle away from working. I'm not against progress, I promise, I just think there's a difference between "the future" and "inconvenient right now," and Apple decided to ship the inconvenient part a couple years early and charge you for the privilege of adapting to it.
The other announcement from Monday that I think is going to matter more than people realize is HBO Now, the streaming service without a cable subscription attached, $14.99 a month, launching in April tied to the Game of Thrones premiere. That's the one I'd actually put money on being remembered in five years, more than the watch and maybe more than the laptop. Everybody's been waiting for HBO to unbundle from cable for what feels like a decade of message board arguments, and now it's actually happening, exclusive to Apple's stuff at launch which is its own annoying wrinkle, but still. Baby steps.
Also, small thing, but SXSW kicks off today down in Austin, and my Twitter feed is already full of people complaining about breakfast taco lines and conference wifi. I've never gone. I keep telling myself I'll make the trip one of these years, mostly for the film side of it rather than the tech panels, but then March rolls around and I remember I have a mortgage-adjacent amount of rent to pay and the flights are never cheap once you're booking this close to the date.
Anyway. If you're the kind of person who buys the first version of anything, I'd wait on this MacBook specifically. Not because it's bad, I actually think in a year or two once USB-C peripherals are everywhere it'll look ahead of its time. Right now though it's an early adopter tax with a very pretty case around it, and I've paid that tax enough times on other gadgets to recognize the shape of it.