So Apple had their "Unleashed" event last Monday, the 18th, and I've had six days now to sit with the new MacBook Pro announcement and I keep coming back to the same petty, extremely specific thought: they brought the ports back.
Not the notch. Not the M1 Pro and M1 Max chips, though those benchmarks are genuinely wild if even half of what Apple's marketing slides claim holds up in real use. Not the fact that the Touch Bar is just gone now, replaced with a full row of actual function keys, which honestly I never once used correctly in five years anyway. No, the thing I can't stop thinking about is that the 2021 MacBook Pro has an HDMI port, an SDXC card slot, and MagSafe charging again, and Apple's presentation acted like this was some kind of gift.
It's not a gift. They took those away in 2016. I bought a 13-inch MacBook Pro that year, the first one with the Touch Bar and exactly four USB-C ports and nothing else, and I remember standing in the Apple Store in Bellevue while the guy helping me explained, with a completely straight face, that dongles were "the future of connectivity." I did not think dongles were the future. I thought dongles were a $79 tax on doing basic things like plugging in an SD card from my camera. I still have a drawer, an actual physical drawer, full of USB-C hubs I bought over the past five years because I kept losing the last one or it kept dying or it got hot enough to worry me during a video call. One of them, a cheap one I grabbed at a gas station in Oregon during a work trip, only ever worked if you plugged it in at a specific angle and jiggled it slightly. I used that thing for eight months out of sheer stubbornness.
So yes, I'm happy the new 14-inch and 16-inch models have real ports again. The 14-inch starts at $1,999 with the base M1 Pro, 16GB of RAM and 512GB of storage, and the 16-inch starts at $2,499. That's not cheap, obviously, and I'm not buying one this week, but I'd genuinely consider it once the reviews are out and once I know whether the notch is as annoying in daily use as it looks in photos. Having a chunk cut out of your menu bar to make room for a camera is a weird choice for a company that spent years making fun of other laptops for having thick bezels. We'll see. I've been wrong about caring less than I thought about a design quirk before (the Home button, RIP, still miss it some days).
The other small thing from the same event that I liked more than I expected: AirPods 3 got announced too, $179, and they finally look like the AirPods Pro shape instead of the little white toothbrush heads. No noise cancellation on these, which is the obvious way Apple keeps daylight between the two product lines, but the shorter stems and the spatial audio support are nice for something in that price range.
Separately, and I promise this is unrelated enough that I almost cut it, my Twitter timeline this week has been absolutely flooded with bitcoin ETF talk after the ProShares fund started trading on the stock exchange. I don't have a strong take on it beyond: I don't own any crypto, I'm not going to start now because a fund makes it slightly more convenient to gamble on it through a normal brokerage account, and I find the whole discourse exhausting in a way I can't fully articulate. Maybe that's a me problem. Feel free to disagree in the comments, people usually do when I say stuff like that.
Anyway. Ports are back, the Touch Bar is dead, and I'm cautiously optimistic about a laptop for the first time in a while. That's really it for today, just wanted to get this down before the next news cycle buries it, which around here tends to happen in about four days flat.