A few days ago, a brand new MacBook Pro 15″ laptop arrived. It is meant for one of my coworkers and I thought I had everything set up to rock and roll. Well, so much fail came to roost today on my shoulders. First, the MacBook, a big beautiful machine requires Windows 7 64-bit to be present to be able to set it up in Bootcamp on this machine, d’oh! I have Windows 7 32-bit on memory stick. Fnord.
As I was fiddling with the unit, and the fact that this didn’t occur to me at all is a testament to how pervasive wifi is in my life, I noticed that this laptop doesn’t have an Ethernet port on it. Apple sacrificed the Ethernet port in the aim to make this sleek slim metal box of sexy technology happen. It’s the 21st century and if someone buys a MacBook, then the logic that I can work out for myself is that Wifi is assumed. Except for when it isn’t. There’s an adapter that will make it work, and frankly I can’t be really shocked that Apple would dump Ethernet especially when there is Ethernet to Thunderbolt adapters for sale, as Thunderbolt can easily carry gigabit data rates and the port is supa-teeny.
So here I sit, this laptop will be starving for Wifi soon, and I need an adapter. After some investigation it appears that the best solution is USB Ethernet adapters as the Thunderbolt adapter (as far as I can tell) fails to understand sleep/wake cycles and that’s a deal-breaker for me. I don’t need gigabit speeds so it all works out to be the same in the end.
It’s interesting to me to witness all the technology that is no longer around by default. COM ports are gone, long ago. CD/DVD drives are gone, which is constant source of surprise to me, and now Ethernet ports are all being shuffled off. All of these things can be adapted to USB, and some of them to Thunderbolt, but these bold choices are surprising me. I find myself agreeing with them, for the sake of the form factor and how USB and Thunderbolt can do so much, it does make sense to me.
God help people who are used to certain historical technologies, they may find themselves on the sacrificial stone block to the gods of progress.