Many Apple fans will buy two new products from their favorite company this year, and especially ahead of the holidays: the iPhone 7 and the brand new MacBook Pro. But interestingly, they won’t actually be able to connect their brand new iPhone 7 to their brand new MacBook Pro without making an extra purchase.
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The MacBook Pro comes with between two and four USB-C/Thunderbolt 3 ports, which means they’re not compatible with the USB cable that ships with the iPhone 7. In other words, you’ll have to buy a USB-C to Lightning Cable from Apple, which retails for $25, to be able to charge your phone with your laptop, move files quickly and easily, or to install iOS updates using the MacBook Pro.
Sure, you can always charge the phone from an outlet rather than the MacBook, which is a much better option. But laptops are, you know, portable and outlets aren’t always available.
And you can use iCloud and iCloud Drive to move photos and other files from the MacBook Pro to the iPhone 7 and back, but iCloud doesn’t always work as it should and if you’re on the go, that means using up precious mobile data.
And what about backups? Backing up the iPhone to a computer will let you encrypt the backup, a feature not available on iCloud backups. Moving photos is also the kind of task that’s best done with a cable, especially if there’s a lot of data to move back and forth.
In the grand scheme of things, it’s understandable that Apple wants to simplify the way its products are designed. And wireless is definitely the future. But it’s one thing to remove the aging headphone jack from a phone and quite another to ditch a port that’s still very much in use.
Of course, if you own a 12-inch MacBook and an iPhone 7, this is not news to you since you already have the same problem.
