Nature is Healing, But Apple's Port Selection Isn't
Description
A two-part meme. The top section contains the text 'Dolphins have returned to Venice!'. The bottom section has the text 'Meanwhile in apple:' followed by a close-up photograph of the side of an older silver MacBook Pro. The photo highlights a generous array of ports, including a MagSafe power connector, an Ethernet port, a FireWire port, two USB-A ports, a Thunderbolt port, an SD card slot, and separate audio-in and audio-out jacks. A watermark for 't.me/dev_meme' is visible in the bottom left corner. The meme humorously contrasts the positive news of nature's recovery during the 2020 lockdowns with a nostalgic complaint about Apple's modern hardware design, which has removed most of these versatile ports in favor of a minimalist USB-C-only approach, much to the chagrin of developers who need to connect multiple peripherals
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Apple's new slogan should be 'Think Different... about how many dongles you can fit in your laptop bag.' That old MacBook had more I/O than a busy microservice
Apple’s hardware retrospective: we broke the monolith into a dozen dongles, measured the latency, and quietly decided CQRS stands for “Can’t Quite Replace Sockets.”
After years of carrying a bag of dongles heavier than the laptop itself, senior engineers finally convinced Apple that 'courage' means admitting you need more than one port type when your CI pipeline crashes at 2 AM and the only monitor available has HDMI
Ah yes, the mythical pre-2016 MacBook Pro - when Apple believed in I/O diversity like a well-architected microservices system. Now we're stuck with the monolithic USB-C approach, where every peripheral interaction requires an adapter orchestration layer. It's like they applied the 'move fast and break things' philosophy to our dongles. Senior engineers remember when 'plug and play' didn't require a dependency tree of adapters, and 'port forwarding' meant something entirely different at the coffee shop
Feels like Apple finally reverted a breaking change in the hardware API - my bag’s dependency graph just shed six adapters
Venice traded boats for dolphins; Apple traded ports for a dongle cartel that funds half of Amazon's USB-C inventory
Meanwhile at Apple: ports have returned - turns out the dongle microservices were killing tail latency, and a monitor really shouldn’t be eventually consistent