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Apple Stops Selling 2015 MacBook Pro With Old-Style Keyboard, Legacy Ports (arstechnica.com)
After announcing new MacBook Pro models today, Apple has removed the 2015 MacBook Pro from the Mac section of its website. Ars Technica reports: Beloved by many, the 2015 MacBook Pro had a number of features that have since been changed or have disappeared entirely from new MacBook Pro models. Arguably the most polarizing among these tweaks is the butterfly keyboard -- the 2015 MacBook Pro predates that mechanism, making its traditional keyboard a preferred alternative for many users. The 2015 MacBook Pro also contained legacy ports that Apple has since abandoned in the newest models: USB-A, HDMI, and Thunderbolt 2 ports, and an SD card slot. All of the newest MacBook Pros exclusively feature Thunderbolt 3 ports, which some will appreciate but all will scowl at when they're forced to buy multiple dongles to connect legacy accessories. Currently, Apple has a few 2015 MacBook Pro models listed in its online clearance section, but it's likely that Apple will not have more to sell after those are gone.
The Onion beat you to that punchline almost a decade ago.
well they'd go well with having a not shit keyboard and ports that most people still use.
People have been predicting Apple would go out of business since 1984. They've survived this long and with much bigger mistakes, they'll be fine.
I remember when apple dropped the floppy drive way back when. Everyone I knew who had a mac bought an external floppy drive because apple mindlessly dropped it before there was actually a replacement.
There was a replacement, CD-RW. A CD-RW drive was standard equipment on all Apple computers of the era except the lowest end iMac desktops. Also at the time I remember floppy disks being notoriously unreliable and too small to store the growing size of files. A floppy drive was fine for text, simple HTML, and such but worthless for people that were wanting to play MP3 files, move PDFs, and so on. At the time there was a lot of competition for floppy replacements and choosing anything as a replacement at the time would most likely result in failure. It was perhaps quite wise to leave the choice to the user to buy as a peripheral.
What competed with floppy? There's the CD-RW I mentioned, it stored a lot but was slow and awkward at first, and still kind of expensive. Zip drives were doing well, at 100MB each, fast, and (IIRC) about $10 per disc. There was the "floptical", a magnetic/optical hybrid that was backward compatible with floppies in that it could read and write floppies in the same drive. There was the MO drive, or magneto-optical, which as I recall worked similarly to the floptical but confusingly came in multiple incompatible sizes/formats. PD, phase-writer dual, which was similar to and somewhat backward compatible with CD-ROM. There was the big brother to Zip, Jazz, a drive that had 1GB, and later on 2GB, cartridges. There was the Mini-disc, which started as a purely audio storage media but moved into data storage. I'm sure I'm missing a few.
Two things were clear at the time, the floppy was essentially already dead as a usable storage media, and what would ultimately replace it was unclear.
Most people I knew got Zip drives. The place I worked at the time used MO. What signaled the end of the floppy to me was coming to work and finding a CD-R in my mailbox with a note that I was to do something with the file on the disc. I don't remember what I was to do with the file only that I was confused to put the CD-R in my computer and find only a single 2MB file. I went to the author of the note to ask if there was supposed to be more than a single 2MB file on a disc that could store 700MB. He told me he tried putting it on a floppy but it wouldn't fit. He thought he might put it on a MO disc but he knew my computer didn't have a MO drive. All else failing he burned it to a CD-R (which were still kind of expensive at the time) for me to work on because he knew all the computers in the department had a CD-ROM drive.
I mentioned CD-RW as the replacement for floppy because hindsight is 20/20. At the time the choices weren't so clear.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.