Judi Sohn

Reinventing myself one crisis at a time.

Apple, could you BE any more stingy on the USB ports?

As I feared, this is a problem. The MacBook Pro has 2, count ’em, just 2 USB ports. I could buy a $400 Dell desktop that comes with 8 ports. My 2+ year old PC laptop had 6. This top-of-the-line notebook has 2. Two!?!

I have an external mouse and keyboard, an external hard drive, a printer, a scanner, an iPod, a phone and maybe I want to use my Wacom tablet sometime. I have a couple of 4 port hubs here, but devices that require power won’t work in 2 of the slots. So while I’m syncing my iPod, no external keyboard for a while, I care more about the mouse.

Isn’t it wonderful that it has FW 800 and 400 ports. Too bad I don’t have any firewire devices. Wasted. On top of everything else, looks like I’m shopping for larger hubs, too. 

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Judi Sohn

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5 responses to “Apple, could you BE any more stingy on the USB ports?”

  1. Put the printer on an airport (express or base station). Share it from there. Not the most help, but it eliminates one device and sets it up for Rendezvous, errrr… Bonjour printing anyway, yes?

  2. I was going to say “Yours has *two*? Mine only has one!” — but I started turning it around, just to double-check, and found a second one on the *other* side. Weird design. (shakes head)

  3. You might consider using a wireless Bluetooth mouse and keyboard. Also, I believe the USB Apple Keyboard has an additional USB port on it to hook up devices.

  4. A friend is sending me a bluetooth mouse he’s not using, and I did end up getting an Apple keyboard for exactly that reason. Although some devices don’t like being plugged into a keyboard. They want more power than that.