Author Topic: New Mac Pro Retinal Has No Optical Drive And No Ethernet - Duh  (Read 20017 times)

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Offline SgtRockTopic starter

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Greetings EEVBees:

--The new Macs Pros are bound to leave some cursing a blue streak, like the Furnace Fighting Father in Christmas Story. See the below link for a very funny article about Apple's latest cock-up, and and recollections of past bone headed moves, whereby Apple forced people to accommodate the future, years to soon:

http://www.reghardware.com/2012/06/15/something_for_the_weekend_apple_retina_display_angst/

--And in other news, a working Apple 1, was sold by Southeby's for $374,500. Unsubstantiated rumors are going around, that the PC was sold by phone bid, to an extremely cheerful Australian with a high pitched voice. Hmmm!

"In the heat of battle, my father wove a tapestry of obscenity that as far as we know, is still hanging in space over Lake Michigan."
Ralphie Parker

Best Regards
Clear Ether
 

Offline AntiProtonBoy

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Re: New Mac Pro Retinal Has No Optical Drive And No Ethernet - Duh
« Reply #1 on: June 18, 2012, 03:54:30 am »
Crap article, IMO.

I totally understand the lack of optical drives, they are a big "meh". No ethernet port, that I also understand... when was the last time you plugged your laptop to a wired network?

The real crappy aspect is the trend towards no upgrade support for devices.
 

Offline 8086

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Re: New Mac Pro Retinal Has No Optical Drive And No Ethernet - Duh
« Reply #2 on: June 18, 2012, 03:58:43 am »

when was the last time you plugged your laptop to a wired network?


Yesterday.

Though, I agree with the optical drive thing, there is little need for it really. Ethernet is very useful to some people though.
 

Offline free_electron

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Re: New Mac Pro Retinal Has No Optical Drive And No Ethernet - Duh
« Reply #3 on: June 18, 2012, 04:38:24 am »
Who needs optical drives... It's all download and streaming anyway. And backup is done in the cloud...
The future has been here at least a year...
As for lack of ethernet.. That is a bit annoying. For security reasons i refuse wifi in the house. Same at work. No wifi allowed. ..
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Any comments, or points of view expressed, are my own and not endorsed , induced or compensated by my employer(s).
 

Offline SgtRockTopic starter

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Re: New Mac Pro Retinal Has No Optical Drive And No Ethernet - Duh
« Reply #4 on: June 18, 2012, 04:53:28 am »
Dear AntiProtonBoy:

--Thanks for your comment. Please allow me to gently and respectfully, chide you a little.

--Assume for a moment that you have only the following. A high speed internet connection which is not wireless, (a $5 to $20 cost per mo.). A new Apple Mac Pro, and a brand new, in the box, Apple Airport router or equivalent. How do you connect?

--You are on the road in East Yahoo. The motel does not provide wireless, but does have the old obsolete wall jack, which allows management to have complete positive control of access. How do you connect?

--You do not have a Desktop and you suspect the Cable Modem or the Router, or maybe even (yikes) the Apple Mac Pro is not functioning. How do you check, it?

--A young woman, whose Email address, you misplaced, posts you a DVD disk containing pictures of her and her girlfriends on the beach in Cancun....

--Next Apple will do away with USB, and tell you to just, get  wireless cameras, scanners and what not, and use the cloud. They will tell you "Don't be a fuddy duddy." Enter the future, eschew backward compatibility, and tell the Old Folks and anyone who is not at the absolute latest level of technology to just p*ss off." Eh?

"You should never bet against anything in science at odds of more than about 1012 to 1."
Ernest Rutherford 1871 1937

Best Regards
Clear Ether
 

Offline SeanB

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Re: New Mac Pro Retinal Has No Optical Drive And No Ethernet - Duh
« Reply #5 on: June 18, 2012, 04:59:36 am »
And, as Apple is of the opinion that you only need ONE........ A necessity is an 8 port USB hub, an external DVD writer, an external USB/ethernet adaptor, another mouse, a tablet and such.
 

Offline vk6zgo

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Re: New Mac Pro Retinal Has No Optical Drive And No Ethernet - Duh
« Reply #6 on: June 18, 2012, 05:46:14 am »
Who needs optical drives... It's all download and streaming anyway. And backup is done in the cloud...
The future has been here at least a year...*
As for lack of ethernet.. That is a bit annoying. For security reasons i refuse wifi in the house. Same at work. No wifi allowed. ..
*Quite apart from the fact that what you said is impossible,the future sucks,it always has!
Bugger! now I'm doing it too! ;D

PS: The "future" is apparently around 1988 to the spell check on this site----- It got all upset with wifi,offering "wife","Fifi" & "Wini"
It also tries to get me to change Google to "Go ogle". ::)

Of course,both "wifi" & "Google",like "Queensland Roar",are  Bleep-ing stupid names!!
Sorry,-----"In" joke! ;D
 

Offline AntiProtonBoy

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Re: New Mac Pro Retinal Has No Optical Drive And No Ethernet - Duh
« Reply #7 on: June 18, 2012, 05:52:48 am »
--Assume for a moment that you have only the following. A high speed internet connection which is not wireless, (a $5 to $20 cost per mo.). A new Apple Mac Pro, and a brand new, in the box, Apple Airport router or equivalent. How do you connect?
I don't use Airport, but I believe its default factory settings should allow access to the device over wireless.

Quote
-You do not have a Desktop and you suspect the Cable Modem or the Router, or maybe even (yikes) the Apple Mac Pro is not functioning. How do you check, it?
Use my phone and other myriad of Wifi capable devices to test connectivity. If they all fail, then router is dead. If not, take the laptop back to the Apple "genius" bars and let them deal with it.

Quote
--You are on the road in East Yahoo. The motel does not provide wireless, but does have the old obsolete wall jack, which allows management to have complete positive control of access. How do you connect?

--A young woman, whose Email address, you misplaced, posts you a DVD disk containing pictures of her and her girlfriends on the beach in Cancun....

--Next Apple will do away with USB, and tell you to just, get  wireless cameras, scanners and what not, and use the cloud. They will tell you "Don't be a fuddy duddy." Enter the future, eschew backward compatibility, and tell the Old Folks and anyone who is not at the absolute latest level of technology to just p*ss off." Eh?
Look I'm not saying ethernet was absolutely redundant. It's still very useful. My point was, your average sixpack joe will practically NEVER use ethernet when he's got the laptop on the couch while watching football. Everyone I know uses WiFi exclusively in their home and when going to places. Not once in my travels have I seen a motel, restaurant, cafe, toilet without WiFi access.

If you are in a situation where you don't have an optical drive to view the junk people sent you, then too bad. How often does that happen? Never. There are so many ways around this: Either upload the content of the DVD at work with an old PC using optical drives to dropbox, or copy to USB, etc. What if there are no computers that use optical drives any more? Well I guess that tells you something profound: Optical media is obsolete, and hence sending optical media over mail is akin to sending a floppy disk.

 

Offline SgtRockTopic starter

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Re: New Mac Pro Retinal Has No Optical Drive And No Ethernet - Duh
« Reply #8 on: June 18, 2012, 06:26:43 am »
Dear AntiProtonBoy:

--Thanks again for your response. I hope you will not take it amiss if I remonstrate further. You may be correct about the latest Apple Airport, but my old one requires a wired connection to setup the handshake. So, let us see if I have this right:
1) There are no places without WiFi, You cleverly dodged the question as proposed, I.E. a motel in East Yahoo, without WiFi.
2) Vk6go says he does not have WiFi at home or work. Hmm! Perhaps he is hallucinating.
3) The Apple Mac Pro is a great stand alone machine as long a you have an old Desktop and myriad wireless devices.

--As long as you are toting around a myriad of wireless devices, you probably would not mind the added weight of a USB Ethernet hookup, just in the unlikely event that a WiFi free location is encountered.

"People must understand that science is inherently neither a potential for good nor for evil. It is a potential to be harnessed by man to do his bidding."
Glenn Theodore Seaborg 1912 - 1999
 
Best Regards
Clear Ether
 

Offline _Sin

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Re: New Mac Pro Retinal Has No Optical Drive And No Ethernet - Duh
« Reply #9 on: June 18, 2012, 06:28:17 am »
My MacBook Air doesn't have ethernet or a DVD drive either. If I need either of those things, I just plug them in. Which is what I'd do if I had one of these new MacBooks. I could probably count on one hand the number of times I've done either. These new machines have quite a lot of fast external IO (both Thunderbolt and USB3) for this purpose.

Programmer with a soldering iron - fear me.
 

Offline T4P

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Re: New Mac Pro Retinal Has No Optical Drive And No Ethernet - Duh
« Reply #10 on: June 18, 2012, 06:36:37 am »
All that inconvenience you have to go through and spending so many dollars just for the look
HEY GUYS WAKE UP APPLE IS BULLSHIT
 

Offline westfw

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Re: New Mac Pro Retinal Has No Optical Drive And No Ethernet - Duh
« Reply #11 on: June 18, 2012, 06:45:18 am »
Quote
A necessity is an 8 port USB hub, an external DVD writer, an external USB/ethernet adaptor, another mouse, a tablet and such.
Horrors!

They might have to call it a "docking station" or something like that.
5+ years ago I had a thinkpad (X30?) whose normal use involved a dock that contained the optical drive, hardwired network interface, mouse and keyboard interfaces.  I seem to recall it working fine...

A true Apple believer doesn't upgrade their laptop; they just buy the newer model.  Most of the agnostic PC users do the same thing; I personally decided a long time ago it wasn't worth fighting the IT department to get a system I liked "just give me the current standard model.  Thank you.  Send me an email when it's time to upgrade.  Bye."

It is a clever, and perhaps perhaps offensive, marketing maneuver to charge a price premium on the basis of leaving things missing, but technically it's pretty much a non-issue.

If you don't like it, don't buy it.  You're not the target market, anyway.
 

Offline joelby

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Re: New Mac Pro Retinal Has No Optical Drive And No Ethernet - Duh
« Reply #12 on: June 18, 2012, 06:54:47 am »
If you really need it, the Ethernet adaptor is $29, which isn't too bad. If you're stingy and don't require gigabit speeds, USB-Ethernet adaptors can be found on eBay for under $10. Similarly, USB-connected DVD drives are pretty cheap.

Are you upset about the lack of 5 1/4 floppy drive as well? I also noticed that it had no built-in GPIB port. The nerve.
 

Offline vk6zgo

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Re: New Mac Pro Retinal Has No Optical Drive And No Ethernet - Duh
« Reply #13 on: June 18, 2012, 06:59:00 am »
Dear AntiProtonBoy:

--Thanks again for your response. I hope you will not take it amiss if I remonstrate further. You may be correct about the latest Apple Airport, but my old one requires a wired connection to setup the handshake. So, let us see if I have this right:
1) There are no places without WiFi, You cleverly dodged the question as proposed, I.E. a motel in East Yahoo, without WiFi.
2) Vk6go says he does not have WiFi at home or work. Hmm! Perhaps he is hallucinating.
3) The Apple Mac Pro is a great stand alone machine as long a you have an old Desktop and myriad wireless devices.

--As long as you are toting around a myriad of wireless devices, you probably would not mind the added weight of a USB Ethernet hookup, just in the unlikely event that a WiFi free location is encountered.

"People must understand that science is inherently neither a potential for good nor for evil. It is a potential to be harnessed by man to do his bidding."
Glenn Theodore Seaborg 1912 - 1999
 
Best Regards
Clear Ether
Sarge,you got it wrong with (2)--That wasn't me,it was free_electron,& I think it was only home he was referring to.

I have WiFi on my laptop,but I normally use a 3G "dongle" in the USB port to access the Internet when I'm away from home.
Most of the Motel/Hotels that we've been to which have WiFi,want you to get the password from Reception,so the Bogey Man can't use it free!

We did use a Hotel's Ethernet once,but it was very restricted in time if you didn't want to incur  large extra costs.
 

Offline EEVblog

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Re: New Mac Pro Retinal Has No Optical Drive And No Ethernet - Duh
« Reply #14 on: June 18, 2012, 07:05:53 am »
I totally understand the lack of optical drives, they are a big "meh". No ethernet port, that I also understand... when was the last time you plugged your laptop to a wired network?

All the time.
Far superior connection quality when recording The AmpHour for example.

Dave.
 

Offline AntiProtonBoy

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Re: New Mac Pro Retinal Has No Optical Drive And No Ethernet - Duh
« Reply #15 on: June 18, 2012, 07:18:47 am »
1) There are no places without WiFi, You cleverly dodged the question as proposed, I.E. a motel in East Yahoo, without WiFi.
Not dodging the question. You need to look at this from a grander perspective. Sure, you can cherry pick exceptional circumstances, like that East Yahoo motel. So what? Places like that is becoming a minority and will need to catch up. Even if the Average Joe's laptop happens to support an Ethernet port, what if he's got no cables for it? He's screwed either way. (People don't carry extra cables with them that often.)

Quote
2) Vk6go says he does not have WiFi at home or work. Hmm! Perhaps he is hallucinating.
3) The Apple Mac Pro is a great stand alone machine as long a you have an old Desktop and myriad wireless devices.
Users on this forum are electronics geeks, nerds, programmers, with different needs compared to a non-tech user. My router doesn't have a WiFi either. Apple's target audience is not you and me. They target Apple fans with their shiny Apple devices and Apple access points and Apple cloud servers.

Personally I wouldn't what a laptop without Ethernet, but I can envision a future where Ethernet is becoming less relevant for portable devices. Tablets have been working fine without it for a while now.

Quote
--As long as you are toting around a myriad of wireless devices, you probably would not mind the added weight of a USB Ethernet hookup, just in the unlikely event that a WiFi free location is encountered.
To do the test, in reality you'll need... 1 smart phone. That's it. People who are mobile and want a laptop will most likely have at least one other portable device that is WiFi capable.
 

Offline amyk

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Re: New Mac Pro Retinal Has No Optical Drive And No Ethernet - Duh
« Reply #16 on: June 18, 2012, 07:47:51 am »
This somewhat reminds me of Apple's latest iPod Nano, which was a huge step backwards compared to the previous model --- no video camera, voice recorder, FM radio, nor built-in speaker. (It should be mentioned that the Chinese clones of them have had these features years ago --- see http://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=139 http://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=175 and http://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=169 --- not excellently implemented, but they were the first to do it, before Apple.)

I can understand omitting features in models like the Macbook Air and Thinkpad X series because they're ultralights and not designed for heavy work, but doing that with their highest-end model is rather distasteful.

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Offline G7PSK

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Re: New Mac Pro Retinal Has No Optical Drive And No Ethernet - Duh
« Reply #17 on: June 18, 2012, 08:02:08 am »
You hard drive dies or gets corrupted how do you re load the OS and drivers without the optical drive your wireless wont work without the drivers loaded (unless they put that in the BIOS or whatever its called now).
 

Offline joelby

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Re: New Mac Pro Retinal Has No Optical Drive And No Ethernet - Duh
« Reply #18 on: June 18, 2012, 08:05:52 am »
You hard drive dies or gets corrupted how do you re load the OS and drivers without the optical drive your wireless wont work without the drivers loaded (unless they put that in the BIOS or whatever its called now).

You can reinstall Mac OS X over the Internet using OS X Recovery, which is built in to EFI. Alternatively you could copy the installation media to a bootable USB flash drive or use an external DVD drive. I believe you can also connect to a DVD drive shared by another Mac over a LAN.
 

Offline _Sin

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Re: New Mac Pro Retinal Has No Optical Drive And No Ethernet - Duh
« Reply #19 on: June 18, 2012, 09:02:24 am »
Seriously, if the lack of a built in ethernet port or dvd drive is an issue, buy a different laptop. It's not like Apple just forced the whole world to stop making them. Most of the MacBook Pro line still has them - just not the slimmer ones with the fancy new display.

If you use those things occasionally, then just buy the external versions. I'd definitely get the external ethernet adapter because it's cheap and small. The value of the DVD drive is debateable.

Are they using their premium models to "force" people to get used to some new way of working they've decided is better? Yes. They do that a lot. Pretty much every product they make misses out features which some users claim are "essential". In exchange you get something else - perhaps just a fancy looking machine, but usually something tangible, such as the new displays and smaller form-factor. It's a trade-off. Mostly they pitch it just right - pre-empting some kind of transition in the market place which was going to happen regardless, with just the right product at just the right time.

Apple do not make swiss-army-knife style products, which try to be all things to all people.

As a consumer, you always have a choice. If Apple really got it spectacularly wrong, I guess we'll see the products fail. Unless you actually believe that *only* sheep-like Apple fanboys buy their devices. In which case you're an idiot. Moronic hipsters with more money than sense can't be more than a tiny %age of Apple's user base. The rest of us genuinely like the products.

Hell my old MacBook Pro is the best Windows machine (laptop or otherwise) I've ever owned. It's solidly built, fast and reliable.
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Offline G7PSK

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Re: New Mac Pro Retinal Has No Optical Drive And No Ethernet - Duh
« Reply #20 on: June 18, 2012, 09:53:57 am »
The real reason that there is no optical drive is most likely to do with itunes, they are trying to force you into buying from that source alone the next thing is you will find that the OS wont let you download music and films from any other venue.
 

Offline Omicron

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Re: New Mac Pro Retinal Has No Optical Drive And No Ethernet - Duh
« Reply #21 on: June 18, 2012, 09:56:10 am »
For me the most promising thing is the appearance of super fast serial busses on notebooks, like USB 3.0 and Thunderbolt. These essentially take away the need for a notebook to have every which port or built in device. Case in point: you can add gigabit ethernet to the retina mac pro with a 29 dollar adapter that is so small it essentially just becomes part of your ethernet cable. That is the real future in my opinion: a notebook with a sufficient number of generic ports that you can adapt to just about anything and this without the slow performance that you traditionally had with USB 2.0 or 1.1. That applies to non Apple machines equally well and I'm sure we will see other vendors exploring the same route.
 

Offline rr100

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Re: New Mac Pro Retinal Has No Optical Drive And No Ethernet - Duh
« Reply #22 on: June 18, 2012, 10:03:56 am »
The big problem with Apple nowadays is that being so successful many companies try to copy them, not necessarily on technical merits but just because "Apple does it" and "Apple has so much success" (so if they copy some bits they think they'll get a piece of the pie too).
So you end up with laptops and phones with non-removable batteries, laptops where you can't upgrade/replace the hard drive or RAM, laptops where you need to carry/pay for things that you took for granted in your last laptop (DVD, ethernet, VGA output).
 

Offline Monkeh

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Re: New Mac Pro Retinal Has No Optical Drive And No Ethernet - Duh
« Reply #23 on: June 18, 2012, 10:31:54 am »
The lack of ethernet I would find annoying, but the optical drive can go and stay away. They use a lot of space in the laptop and hardly get used. I'm all for a second HDD/SSD, or an additional battery, or, actually, how about a hotswap bay which can do any of those things and more?

Oh, wait, hasn't my Thinkpad got that? Strange, it seems to have that. And they have done for how many years?! Well, I never would've expected that..
 

Offline 8086

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Re: New Mac Pro Retinal Has No Optical Drive And No Ethernet - Duh
« Reply #24 on: June 18, 2012, 10:34:29 am »
hotswap bay which can do any of those things and more?

Oh, wait, hasn't my Thinkpad got that? Strange, it seems to have that. And they have done for how many years?! Well, I never would've expected that..

My Asus convertible has that. But I don't think we'll ever see something so practical come from Apple. Form over function is their thing, as we all know.
 


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