[stirner]

I’m with you. Maybe it’s something specific to being a techie and having a ton of peripherals, but being able to connect power, display, keyboard, mouse, webcam, backup drive, Ethernet, etc. with a single cable when I sit down at my desk was absolutely worth the somewhat pricey TB3 dock, especially when switching between work and personal devices.

I’m fine with them adding ports back as long as they still let you do PD into the TB3 ports. It’s still not super easy to determine exactly what features are supported by different devices/adapters/cables, especially when dealing with USB-C. However, it seems like a bit of a backslide on a bold move to push the state of the art forward that I believe was the right move.

Re: MagSafe, I honestly think they would be better off making a MagSafe adapter—a pair of small terminals which connect to the end of the power cable and the port that connect to each other magnetically. I imagine they could make this pretty low-profile and clean. But then it wouldn’t be exclusive to Apple’s own hardware, so I doubt they would ever go this route. A quick search turned up an existing adapter [1] that supports 100W PD and 40 GBPs data transfer so it’s definitely doable.

[1] https://www.newsshooter.com/2020/03/30/magrig-magnetic-usb-c...

[thefunnyman]

My biggest wish would be for them to embrace standard display adapter technology and stick with usb c. I have a lot of thunderbolt docks that only work on Windows because of Apple’s outright refusal to support MST [1]. I recently switched to a Mac for work and this has been a major pain for my docking setup. Funny enough, it all works fine if you bootcamp your Mac since Windows supports MST. [1] https://discussions.apple.com/thread/251444928

[llampx]

Plenty of Windows laptops support TB3 docks, it is not something unique to Apple and definitely does not preclude having other ports on the machine for when you don't carry your TB3 dock.