Sun, 15 Nov 2009

Apple Gives With One Hand

A few months back, I bought a MacBook Pro for a bunch of reasons of which the most important was my expectation that I would be able to just do things when I wanted to. That expectation has been largely met and — apart from the usual annoyances arising from the irritating OS-X user interface and its inability to be configured to my taste — I’ve been quite pleased with it.

A couple of days ago, I wanted to do something and immediately thought of the MacBook as the enabling tool only to be thwarted by Apple’s decision to remove the audio line-in jack from later models of the MacBook Pro. Yes, they added a couple of other trinkets to compensate, but still this deletion is incomprehensible to me. If they had actually run out of space on the edges of the beautiful case, I’d have understood; but there’s plenty of room left.

Yes, I can probably buy a USB sound thingy and expect it to work, but my visitor wanted a copy of an old audio cassette with an interview that we’d done in the past and I had thought it would be easy to manage on the spot, having been sure that I’d seen somebody with an audio cable plugged into a MacBook Pro in the past — it hadn’t occurred to me to check that my more recent machine had the same capabilities.

Posted at: 07:27

Path: /technology   |  permalink