The 3.5mm port on the MacBook Pro is not just for headphones.
It doubles as an S/PDIF connector for outputting digital optical audio, so can be used to feed external DACs or other audio equipment with lossless audio.
I don't want to have to carry around a bag full of adapters for my laptop to be useful, just for the sake of making the machine a couple of millimetres thinner.
As per the iPhone 7, removing the 3.5mm port would free up a fair amount of internal space, which could be used for other purposes, and ultimately contribute to making the laptop thinner.
If there is not already a cable you can buy with lightning at one end and whatever is needed to connect to your audio equipment at the other end, surely it is only a matter of time before there is.
My use case is similar, and I'm bullish on USB-C improving this mess.
At your desk, you just need a dock. Everything you currently connect to your laptop can be connected to that dock, and the cables hidden away, then all you need to connect to your laptop is a single USB cable.
Away from your desk, why is the dongle for your keyboard and mouse a concern? Most dongles are tiny, and can be left plugged in permanently.
It isn't, the point is just that you need 1 dongle for this now, and you'll need 1 dongle for it with USB-C. This isn't making stuff better, but it isn't making stuff worse.
(Well, OK... it is making stuff worse, because you'll need to throw away all your old stuff and buy new stuff... oh, wait, you were thinking of keeping your old laptop? Well then, you'll need two sets of stuff! But the original point was solely about the cables and dongles.)
Not really. Now you need to charge the Macbook with MagSafe and connect the dock to it. It's still two cables. USB-C allows you to charge your mac through the same cord it transfers data to/from.
Not like it matters too much, but I see some point in it — I come to my desk, plug in only one cable from the dock and have it all set. Also I can easily see how demoing it from the stage falls under what Tim Cook calls "innovation" nowadays. Which seems to become more and more important to him.
Optical just feels like a cleaner interface. USB requires drivers, and introduces timing and electrical interference issues.
USB also feels like overkill for an audio interface. It allows transfer of data in both directions, and introduces security risks if you don't fully trust the DAC you are connecting to, or worse still if the DAC is connected to a network/the Internet.
I'm not suggesting for a moment there is any audible difference between the two, but optical audio has always struck me as a 'cleaner' way to output digital audio.
I would be extremely annoyed if it were removed from the MacBook Pro.
"USB requires drivers, and introduces timing and electrical interference issues"
On multi-tasking OSes with memory protection, everything that accesses hardware requires drivers; it's 'just' the amount of driver code that differs (which, for USB vs optical, probably is quite a big difference)
Also, originally USB didn't support isochronous channels at all, so one couldn't guarantee that one could send audio out continuously.
Most USB DACs do not require special drivers. The drivers are included with the OS. If you don't trust the device to be plugged in via USB then you shouldn't buy it. Most DACs are fairly simple hardware and tear downs are common. Check Head-Fi and other audiophile sites.
SPDIF also combines the clock and data in a single signal, it has more or less the same issues with jitter that USB does. Not that it matters since I'm not aware of a single proper study that indicates jitter is audible.
Often there is a receiver IC that will perform clock recovery and convert from S/PDIF to an internal digital audio format, I2S most commonly, to send it to a DAC IC. In this simple setup there generally is no more buffering than needed for operation of the pieces.
In more complex situations, either where the S/PDIF signal is being re-clocked or where the data on the S/PDIF line needs to be decoded, then they will be buffering.
To clarify some terms:
Re-clocking - the system detects the clock rate of the signal but does not use that clock as the reference, instead it will generate it's own clock at the proper frequency. Some buffering is needed here to offset drift between the clocks causing sample starvation.
Encoded data - S/PDIF (really AES3 for the most part) has a framed block transmission format not entirely dissimilar to a TCP packet. There is meta-data, frames, sub-frames, etc, it's not just 'pure audio'. Various formats can be stuffed into these data frames, like compressed audio data (5.1 Dolby Digital for example).
A lot of small providers offer truly "unmetered" bandwidth packages at low cost because for whatever reason they have contractually overprovisioned their bandwidth. They lose nothing by giving away unused bandwidth they have already paid for. Once they attract enough business to consume that bandwidth these deals go away.
That sounds like a horrible relationship, and is certainly not the norm in many cities.
As a property owner, you should not have to request (by means of a "Post No Bills" message or other) that other people don't interfere with your property.
If it's not causing damage or vandalism then I don't quite see the issue. If the material is unwelcome then of course the property owner has every right to take it down. Mostly this ordinance is useful for closed / boarded up buildings, in my recollection.
If your argument is that it takes a lot of resources to apprehend and convict someone, only to send them away for a mere four years, by far the largest cost in all of this is that of keeping them in jail.
It costs around £40k/year to keep someone in jail, not including the opportunity cost of lost productivity.
Will the prospect of an eight year prison sentence make someone less likely to commit the original offence(s) than a four year sentence? Probably not.
Will it reduce the risk of reoffending once they are released? It will probably have the opposite effect.
It's the difference between copyright infringement for commercial gain, and for non-commercial, personal use.
I doubt many torrent site operators make much money from their operations, and if they do make a profit now, the level of risk (and prospect of bankrupting legal actions in the future) probably don't make it worth it.
> The list of regulations that affect startups, especially in the web/software space is rather small. The impact of regulation on the startup scene in Europe is almost zero.
Complete and utter nonsense.
If you're planning on establishing a start-up in the UK/Europe, and you believe this to be the case, you need a lawyer to give you a reality check sharpish.
I've been running a successful startup in Germany for 5 years and I feel the impact of bureaucracy is negligible in the scheme of things.
One exception may be employment law, but that's not made by the EU and generally, once you figure it out for your first employee, it becomes much easier for any 1+n.
It doubles as an S/PDIF connector for outputting digital optical audio, so can be used to feed external DACs or other audio equipment with lossless audio.
I don't want to have to carry around a bag full of adapters for my laptop to be useful, just for the sake of making the machine a couple of millimetres thinner.