I'd bet an extremely high (and growing) percentage of people never connect a digital camera to their computers, and those that do probably do so rarely. So do the benefits here justify the costs?
LOL, your comment is quite funny. This may be true for "most hipsters that don't care about photography", but in reality there are still many folks using regular mirrorless camera or even better, full frame DSLR because their price has dropped so much in the past 3 years. And these folks also happen to be the ones looking for premium laptop options in order to get data transferred fast (wifi is too slow for RAWs) and work on their pictures before publishing them.
It's not because you dont have a use for it that everyone out there is just like you.
Actually, I have a dSLR myself. But I'm a tech nerd and extremely aware that most people are nothing like me. Most people just take selfies on their smartphone cameras, run them through an ig filter, and call it a day.
Again, most people dont have a 1000+ USD laptop. You are not talking about your regular laptop user here - there is definitely more people who have large cameras and not only smartphones among the ones who buy expensive computers.
I mean, I'm obviously biased because of my age, but walk into any college lecture hall and it's all $1000+ MacBooks. Only a small minority of those same students will ever buy a dSLR.
Wifi is not too slow for RAWs. I backed-up my entire library to the cloud over wifi. I would bet most people don't need to transfer their files on a fast enough timescale that wifi is too slow for them.
No it doesn't its a horrible and unnecessary dependency. Why not simply do what Apple did with the MacBook, for those hands full of users who still need an SD reader and can't connect the device directly by wire, they could simply plug in a dongle. It's absolutely stupid really, especially with USB-C looking to take over. Hell, they put it in the damn phone, why not be consistent and go with it everywhere. stupid.
Now you need a separate adapter to carry around with your laptop instead of a nice built-in SD card reader.