So last week Apple did their whole "Spring Forward" event and everybody's still talking about the Watch pricing (starting at $349, shipping April 24 if you believe the rumor mill, preorders supposedly April 10) but the thing I can't stop thinking about is that new 12-inch MacBook. The gold one. The one with exactly one port.
One. Single. USB-C port. That does everything — charging, video out, data transfer, all of it, through one hole on the side of the laptop. Starts at $1299, three colors (silver, space gray, and yes, gold, like the entry-level iPhone), no fan inside it at all which is honestly kind of wild from an engineering standpoint even if it also means it's going to throttle like crazy under any real load.
I'm not buying one. Let's get that out of the way. I need more than one port to do my actual job, and I'm deeply suspicious of any laptop that requires you to choose between charging it and plugging in a mouse. But a bunch of people I know are going to buy one anyway because it's thin and pretty, and if you're one of them, here's what you should actually be budgeting for before it shows up.
The adapters you'll need
Apple's selling three of them and you'll probably end up owning at least two:
- USB-C to USB Adapter: $19. This is the one you need just to plug in a normal flash drive or your phone cable. Basic. Essential.
- USB-C Digital AV Multiport Adapter: $79. HDMI plus a USB-C passthrough plus a regular USB-A port. This is the one for presentations, hooking up to a TV, that kind of thing.
- USB-C VGA Multiport Adapter: $69. Same idea but VGA, for anyone still dealing with projectors from 2006 (which, if you work in an office building older than a decade, is basically guaranteed).
None of these come in the box. You're looking at another $70-150 on top of the laptop price depending on what you actually need to do with it, and that's before you factor in that you'll probably want two of the USB-C-to-USB ones because you will lose the first one within a month. I say this with confidence because I've lost every single dongle Apple has ever sold me.
Go wireless where you can
Honestly the sane move if you're getting one of these is to just stop using wired peripherals entirely. Bluetooth mouse, Bluetooth keyboard if you're not using the built-in one, and get comfortable with the idea that your "backup drive" is now a cloud folder instead of a USB stick you carry around. iCloud Drive is still pretty rough around the edges (it was only opened up to third-party apps last fall and it shows), but Dropbox works fine and that's really the whole workaround. If you need to charge your phone AND use the laptop at the same time you are, per Apple's own design, out of luck unless you buy the $19 adapter and just leave it plugged in permanently, which, at that point, congratulations, you've built yourself a second port.
I've got a drawer in my desk that's basically a graveyard of Apple dongles at this point — a 30-pin to Lightning adapter I bought in a panic in 2012, two different Thunderbolt-to-something cables I can't remember the purpose of, the iPad Camera Connection Kit that never actually worked reliably with any SD card I owned. This new MacBook is clearly going to add to that pile for a lot of people, mine included eventually probably, even though I'm telling myself right now I don't need one.
If you're actually ordering one
My real advice: buy the USB-to-USB adapter same day as the laptop, not after, because you will need it within the first hour of ownership to move your files over. Skip the VGA one unless you specifically know you present in old rooms a lot. And if you're someone who plugs in an external monitor at a desk daily, seriously consider whether this is the right machine for you at all, because a single-port laptop that also needs to charge while driving a display is going to have you constantly unplugging and replugging things, which gets old around day three.
It ships next month. I'll believe the battery life claims when I see them.