I like the Fujifilm X-Pro2. Hard to beat the Leica aesthetic, though.

Of the people that you communicate with on Slack, messenger, iMessage, and Hangouts, how many have you not met in person? I would guess very few. Even if you talk to coworkers on Slack that you have never met in person, you have an ongoing relationship with them.

Comment threads are public discourse, mostly between strangers. You may think that you view everyone you talk to online as human, but you don't. No one does. You can't read a thread with tens or hundreds of participants and consider the nature of their existence.

My opinion (for now) is that there are problematic issues with comments. The discussion we are having right now, though both of us have made it slightly uncivil at times, is interesting to me, and I've learned something from it, so, hey, I guess I'm not against them. However, more often than not, I regret participation.

Swap out "VICE shut down their comments" for the topic of any comment thread ever and you've summed up how they work.

Discourse is healthy

That is like saying food is healthy. There are many kinds of food and many kinds of discourse.

Text based online discourse invariable leads to treating each other poorly. When you don't see someone's reaction while talking to them, you are capable of saying things you would never to say to someone's face.

For example, based on your comments on this thread, I'm angry at you. I think you are an asshole. It's easy for me to say that because you aren't a human to me. You're words on a screen. I'm 95% sure that if we met in person, we'd have a lot in common and get a long quite well.

It's not the dongles or the lack of power specifically, it's a lack of vision or interest in solving the problems that "pro" users face in general.

I'd be most interested to know how it happened in the first place. Almost every designer I've ever known would be outraged if the company they worked for made a decision like that. It looks like you feel the same way. This decision was likely made without designers being involved.

People are upset about having to purchase dongles to use the new MacBook because they already had a rat's nest of things plugged into their machines.

There is nothing wrong with the new MacBook Pro. It just doesn't solve the messy setups that lots of professional users have.

The experience ended so abruptly that it was like a speeding car coming to an immediate stop. The design problems I thought I'd spend years working on stopped being my responsibility in an instant.

I didn't want to jump to the next available design job just to keep busy. After ten years of being a workaholic, I wanted to force myself to take time off and think deeply about the meaning and direction of what I spend my efforts on.

Doing fun things that felt to my brain like work kept me sane.

As far as guilt goes, everyone on the team who needed work was able to find it quickly, so I struggled more with self doubt than with guilt.

That argument is appearing all of the place since the new MBP was released. It could be wishful thinking. Just because Apple isn't catering to "creatives" anymore doesn't mean that their competition is.

I was leading a team of 4 designers. We all got laid off a year ago. It's a complicated story of startup politics. It ended abruptly, and I blamed myself. It was the darkest working experience I've had by far.

The first thing I did was focus on our now defunct team and the friends we left behind at the company that were still in a bad situation (they all were eventually laid off, too). Is everyone ok? Does anyone need help finding work? Recommendations? Feedback on portfolios? Just venting and making sense of it all?

Next I found something that I enjoyed that I could throw myself into. Something intentionally useless. Something that wasn't design or career building or money making. Fallout 4 had just come out and I let myself "waste time" with it to my heart's content. I really needed that.

After that I picked up photography for first time. It opened up an entirely new world of creativity for me to learn about. Unlike interactive design, which I'd been doing for a decade already, I didn't even know the most basic principles, and, maybe more importantly, I could make photographs just for the sake of doing it. They didn't have to solve a problem. I could just enjoy making things.

Eventually my interest in design came back, but now with more direction, perspective, and sense of purpose.