> We need to actually coin a word to describe "company solved their use-case wonderfully and can't resist fiddling around with it for reasons that don't align with their user-base.
Apple can only serve so many people well.
Apparently, you are not the "average" customer.
I'm in this exact situation every time I go shopping for shoes and find out I'm not within 1-sigma from the mean.
It sucks, but it's how mass production and mass integration works. Choice becomes very limited, and no company will rise to address a specific shortcoming for a specific group.
It's important to note that your "average" customer is self—selected; the "average" Apple customer probably doesn't play AAA games (because anybody who does would have needed to buy a Windows machine with higher-end graphics). That is not the same as the "average" laptop buyer would not want to play them, though.
That doesn't mean Apple necessarily needs to go after those people, though, if they believe their current balance can get them customers they want.
I would guess the average customer rarely needs USB ports. Most people use Bluetooth and WiFi. Needing to plug in a physical device seems pretty niche to me these days? The only exception is the charger and monitors. I guess it helps them reduce costs, which customers appreciate, to only have the bus going to one side of the laptop.
I'm by no means the average customer, which is why I have a Pro model, but every time I setup at the desk I use three ports: one for a dongle to my keyboard and trackball, one for the monitor, and one to charge.
I could in fact run the charging through the dongle as well, but then I'd be SOL when I plugged in a hard drive, which I do at least weekly.
I think the two ports but on one side is an aesthetic disaster, but it does have one upside: there are 'mega-dongles' which plug into one half of a MacBook, and those work with both the 2 port and the 4 port models.
Apple can only serve so many people well.
Apparently, you are not the "average" customer.
I'm in this exact situation every time I go shopping for shoes and find out I'm not within 1-sigma from the mean.
It sucks, but it's how mass production and mass integration works. Choice becomes very limited, and no company will rise to address a specific shortcoming for a specific group.