Last night I got together with a few friends to DJ at a new bar not far from my neighborhood in Barcelona. At three in the morning, when we finished, I took a leisurely stroll home in the unusually temperate air, hands stuffed in the pockets of my windbreaker. A few years ago, I would've been schlepping a heavy bag of records, and I probably would have given in and hailed a cab. But since I DJ off USB sticks these days, my headphones were the heaviest piece of gear I had to lug. This morning, I woke up to find out that those same USB sticks, sitting where I left them in the pocket of my jeans, are on the fast track to obsolescence.
At least, that'll be the case if the rest of the industry follows Apple's lead. Yesterday, when the Cupertino tech behemoth announced a new version of its MacBook Pro, the usual USB ports were conspicuously missing—until now, two of them were standard on Apple's high-end laptops—and in their place were four Thunderbolt 3 ports.
In theory, this is a step up for productivity: Apple says that Thunderbolt 3 delivers data transfer of up to 40 gigabits per second, meaning that it'll take less than a minute to copy 14 hours of HD video, 10,000 songs, or 25,000 photos. It's also, in theory, a step up for versatility, since Thunderbolt 3 can accomplish numerous tasks, including connecting high-resolution displays, transferring data, charging external devices, and drawing power. In fact, Thunderbolt 3 is so versatile that now, save one important exception, the new ports are the only ports found on the MacBook Pro, which means that you'll need a dongle, or adapter, to connect any of your old devices. Also gone are the SD card slot, HDMI port, and even the beloved MagSafe—the quick-release magnetic attachment that keeps you from knocking your computer to the floor when you trip over the power cable—since these new laptops also power up through the Thunderbolt 3 port. (For those of us who are clumsy and/or have toddlers, this is bad news indeed.)
We should be getting used to this story by now: Apple giveth, and Apple taketh away. We just went through this, after all, with the disappearing headphone port on the iPhone 7.
In fact, ironically enough, the only traditional socket that remains on the new MacBook Pro is the traditional headphone jack. That's right: After the heated controversy that accompanied the release of the iPhone 7, they've opted to give the beloved aux plug another lease on life—on our laptops, at least. And that's great, except it means Apple aficionados will either need a separate pair of headphones for their phones and their laptops, or they'll need to carry around a dongle to fit the mini-jack-equipped cans into the iPhone's Lightning socket. (It's a good thing that they left the headphone jack, too, as it seems that Apple doesn't even manufacture a Lightning/Thunderbolt adapter yet.)
The good news is that Thunderbolt 3, an Intel standard, is compatible with USB devices, so in most cases, you'll just need an adapter or a new cable, one with a USB 2.0 or 3.0 connector on one end, and USB-C on the other. Still, if you're a Mac user planning to upgrade to the new MacBook Pro, you should probably prepare for the fact that you're going to need to be carrying around a lot of dongles for the foreseeable future. And this spells bad news for musicians, DJs, photographers, videographers, designers, and virtually every other creative producer who uses a computer.
No matter what you do with your computer, you probably use the USB port all the time without even thinking about it. It's what I use to get photos off my camera, via a card reader. I copy audio files onto USB thumb drives to pass to my podcasting partner. When I record interviews, I get them off my Tascam portable recorder by plugging it directly into the USB socket. In the summer months, I've got a stand with a built-in fan to keep the laptop cool; it's powered by USB. My MIDI controllers connect via USB. My whole music library lives on an external hard drive that I connect via USB. Don't even get me started on my FireWire audio interface, which I connect via dongle to the Thunderbolt 2 socket on my current laptop; now I'm going to need yet another dongle for that. Basically, my whole desk is going to dangle with dongles.
In the DJ world, things will similarly have to change. Currently, many DJs store entire virtual crates full of music on miniature flash drives, which connect directly to the Pioneer CDJ turntables that have become the industry standard. Going forward, to get music off their computers and onto their flash drives, they'll need to plug the thumb drives into an adapter like this one.
So it's not the end of the world. In fact, says Peter Kirn, of Create Digital Music, “Thunderbolt 3 is, as far as we know it, generally a good thing for creative users, in that it can drive big displays.” At the same time, he says, Thunderbolt 3 offers few advantages for DJs and music-makers, “because right now we don’t have any hardware in our market that really needs that amount of bandwidth.” And the headaches are real: Musicians and DJs who stick with Mac will have to deal not only with the inconvenience of carrying around a bunch of different adapters, but also a significant cost outlay added on to the already considerable price of a MacBook Pro—and some musicians and DJs are definitely not happy about it.
I wonder, though, if there are broader cultural ramifications to ditching the USB port. Sure, you could argue that complaining about the types of ports included on a $2800 laptop is the very definition of a #firstworldproblem. But USB, it turns out, is a crucial format for the unfettered flow of information across the globe. In Cuba, bootlegged media from outside the country's borders—Hollywood blockbusters, telenovelas, Korean soap operas, PDF files of magazines, etc.—is distributed via something called El Paquete Semanal (or “The Weekly Package”), a hard drive that's carried door-to-door and downloaded to users' computers via USB cable. In North Korea, flash drives filled with contraband media are similarly passed from hand to hand; a human rights non-profit called Flash Drives for Freedom takes donated USB sticks, loads them up with films and e-books from the outside world, and smuggles them into the country. Awesome Tapes from Africa's Brian Shimkovitz tells me that selling music on USB is “quite common” in parts of Africa as well.
In this light, the more worrying aspect of Apple's move is what it might signal about the dominant philosophy among tech companies. Over and over, we're seeing companies move away from open formats and into walled gardens where users must play by the company's rules. Facebook is the prime example of this, but Apple is doing something similar; it's been widely pointed out that by scrapping the headphone jack in the iPhone 7, Apple stands to earn a commission on every Lightning-compatible accessory sold by third-party manufacturers, since Apple owns the trademark on Lightning connectors. It's true that Thunderbolt is an Intel trademark, so in this sense, at least, Apple is contributing to the cause of standardization across the industry. But it's also hard to avoid the suspicion that we're being taken for a ride, as we empty our wallets to stock up on the new connectors—and then fill up landfills with the decidedly non-biodegradable cables we don't need anymore.
Still, with more and more wireless functions on the horizon, it's possible that before long, we'll be able to kiss some of those dongles goodbye. I asked a handful of DJs to share their thoughts on the new MacBook Pro, and France's Teki Latex took an unusually optimistic view, reckoning that digital DJ technology will increasingly incorporate Bluetooth capability—for instance, CDJ players that can wirelessly read the contents of a music library. “Basically, like Jeff Goldblum says in Jurassic Park,” he jokes, “‘Nature will always find a way.’”