Great article by Ben Thompson on building products and businesses with a mobile-first approach. At the end, he makes a solid point about the rumored MacBook Air with a single port:

True, it would be nice to have a keyboard to type longer emails, reports or papers, or a larger screen to watch movies, but those capabilities – again, for most people, not all – are nice to have, not essential. Moreover, all of those capabilities depend on the same cloud services as the phone: email, social networking, photos, all of it comes over the (wireless) network, not a cable.

In this world, a Mobile First world, what exactly is the point of a port?

As I argued on episode 21 of Connected, I’m not sure about the idea of a MacBook Air that combines multiple connections in a single port, but I’m also intrigued by the reason why that could make sense.

In the show, I brought up AirDrop, Mail Drop, cloud backups, and iCloud Photo Library as examples. As more Apple users move (in addition to iCloud) towards local file sharing systems either based on WiFi or BLE and power users continue to rely on MacBook Pros and Mac Pros, would moving away from ports really be that absurd for a new Air?