Finally this dongle hell is over. It was so cringe worthy to see all Apple users carrying around a bag of dongles. Reminded me of the old LAN party cable fun…
Who was carrying around a bag of dongles? Any sane person would just get a tiny hub that fits in your pocket and has USB-A, HDMI, DP, SD, and whatever else you need.
Which is honestly a much better solution than adding SD and HDMI back to the Macbook. I know it's a controversial opinion around these parts, but I never understood the dongle-gate fiasco. A $30 portable hub will add those parts back to anyone that needs them. I sure as hell don't.
It starts like that, then you have some ports fail on that $30 hub then you are buying more junk you wouldn't have needed in the first place if apple had more sense.
I don't know. I have my MacBook Pro since 2016 along with it's HDMI/USB-A Dongle and while the macbook screen failed on me (twice!) I still have the same dongle.
But to be honest I don't need it suuuper often. Just for my USB-A microphone and the occasional projector somewhere. I live in the USB-C future Apple is turning away from haha
I can't remember the last time I've needed USB-A when not at my desk at home, except in the weird cases where I left my Yubikey 5C on my other laptop and needed to plug in my Yubikey A. Generally, when I actually need USB-A, I need a _lot_ of it, so hubs/dongles are a necessity regardless.
And if I'm going to use a hub, I might as well get HDMI, Ethernet, charging, etc. out of it.
The addition of HDMI has eliminated at least 90% of the cases where I've needed to take a dongle somewhere with me.
It's a trade off: wired is faster at charging, wireless is faster at setting up the charging session. If you are going to bed anyways, wireless wins since you just plop the phone down and it is charged when you wake up in the morning.
Even then I take wired charging. It takes all of one second to plug in a lightning cable to the phone. I've plopped my phone down on my charging pad on the other hand, and walked back to find that I had just missed my mark, and the phone was sitting there for hours not charging at all. Happens pretty often and now I need to spend an extra second to confirm that the phone is getting charge while on the pad, vs with lightning when its obvious and just works.
> I've plopped my phone down on my charging pad on the other hand, and walked back to find that I had just missed my mark, and the phone was sitting there for hours not charging at all.
Yes, this is why Apple is including magnetic guided wireless charging in its new iPhones. Lacking that, I had to carefully choose my charging pad to avoid these kinds of problems.
Fishing around for the lightning chord and then trying to line it up with the charging port on the phone is annoying, especially at 5AM in the morning when I'm half awake. Not sure this would be a win for everyone, but it is for me.
