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Robo
Formerly Roboman, still
awesome
 
Join Date: Jul 2004
Location: Portland, OR
 
2019-08-16, 02:40

Quote:
Originally Posted by chucker View Post
A ton of people connect a keyboard and mouse to their laptop. If they’re wireless, they also often use Logitech’s RF solution (incompatible with Bluetooth), so they stick a USB dongle in the laptop.

It’s part inertia/cargo cult, part ergonomics, and part average laptops having really, really bad trackpads.
I thought of that — the only thing my sister has plugged into any of her MacBooks, probably ever, has been a Logitech USB RF adapter for a mouse. (When she got a USB-C MacBook, she took the path of least resistance and bought an adapter for her adapter.) But if she got a new MacBook with no USB port, she would just buy a Bluetooth mouse. And I have a hunch that suddenly, Logitech would start selling a larger variety of Bluetooth mice at lower prices. I don't think she's particularly attached to her current mouse.

It's definitely a factor, but I don't think it would be a dealbreaker in the same way that, say, a specialized user absolutely needing to be able to plug in an obscure piece of equipment that will never support Bluetooth is (which is why I think they'd keep USB on the Pro). She'd probably be slightly annoyed at first and then, a week later, realized that it was always a kind of weird hacky kludge to plug a USB wireless dongle into a notebook that already had built-in wireless.

I don't think "regular folk" take these things as seriously as geeks sometimes do. Like, I'm sure people on the internet would just lose their shit if Apple made a computer with *gasp* no USB ports. But if my sister saw an appealing new MacBook at a reasonable price, and the one catch was "it doesn't work with your current mouse," I don't think that would make her hesitate to buy it. (After all, if maintaining compatibility with existing peripherals was that important to people, the original iMac would have flopped.) I don't think she would view it as Apple "locking down" the Mac, or whatever the inevitable alarming tech media narrative would be.

and i guess i've known it all along / the truth is, you have to be soft to be strong
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