My guess is this change was brought about by all the poor quality USB-C cables, hubs, and chargers out there. I bricked my Macbook Pro M1 by trying to power it from a supposedly compatible hub but wasn't negotiating the power output properly. Had to send it in for repair and have heard many other similar reports... guessing they decided to bring back the Magsafe for fast charging to avoid this headache of cheap/improperly manufactured USB-C hardware.
The place I worked when the USB-C MacBooks came out had a hell of a time with video output. This monitor only works with a DisplayPort dongle, this one won't work with a new MacBook at all, this one works but only if you use one specific cable, this one works but glitches in ways it never did with HDMI, et c. There came to be a whole level of cult knowledge about which laptop + cable + monitor combos would work and which wouldn't.
It was a very dumb situation. If they really wanted to go to USB-C they should have had a transition period where they just replaced the thunderbolt and maybe the charging ports, until shit settled down—which it never really did, because the USB-C cable situation is insane, so here we are, with some ports added back.
It's 2021, almost 2022, and I still wish one of the ports they'd put back was USB-A. I'll probably feel the same way in 2025. Maybe by 2030, when almost none of these MBPs are still in use, I won't still need a USB-A port way more than I need a USB-C port.
Oh man, that's one of my favorite Onion videos. So many clever subtleties that make it a UX nightmare. Like how the first suggestion when you select T is the unicode TM symbol, the absurd sentence predictions that come up first when you type "the a", scrolling through an alphabetical list of every file on your hard drive.
I also imagine they were making a joke with the $2600 starting price, which is funny cause that's what I paid (albeit in Canadian dollars) for my base-model 14" MBP yesterday
The announcement implies that they no longer attempt fast charging over USB-C, so lower power requirement will improve reliability with 3rd party hardware.
