this post was submitted on 24 Nov 2024
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Dude, those two little UBS-C ports do 50x what the ports on the bottom laptop could do
That's true and good, but I still want to be able to plug on an HDMI or Ethernet cable without a damn adapter.
The laptop may actually be too thin for either. Want those ports? Vote with your money, buy a different laptop.
As for hdmi at least, you can get a usb-c-ended cable too.
"Extremely thin" is pretty low on my list of features I want.
If making it a bit thicker gives me ethernet and HDMI then make it thicker. A laptop moves from place to place, and not needing dongles / specialist cables makes it far easier to jump on anybodies desk and just plug in.
Exactly. And most laptops are thick enough if they remove the stupid curve that makes them look thinner than they are. I've even seen laptops with a flip down RJ-45 port so it can maintain the profile.
Look at that top picture again. It's not thinner. Look how much of a taper it has to make you think its thinner.
Looking at the bottom one, the back of the screen has gotten thinner compared to the others, but the bottom has barely changed. They lie to you, port thickness has zero bearing on how thin the laptops are, its all lies
Thankfully USB-C can handle both of those protocols. Just like with Micro USB and Mini before it, it will just take time until the ecosystem catches up. Just, this time, you can run the entirety of possible data streams through a single port.
By the time the ecosystem has "caught up", we'll have USB-D ports to contend with. Possibly even USB-E.
I don't wanna wait until the system catches up I need to hook up my laptop to the projector now, and all the cables are hdmi
You can get USB-C to HDMI cables, you don't need an adapter.
In many settings you get a hdmi cable where the other end is installed out of view, so that's not an option. But HDMI is a bad standard anyways, so I'm fine with having to carry an adapter
I know it can because I've got that exact setup on my work laptop but in order to actually be able to make use of it I need a dongle to use as a breakout and actually give me an HDMI port. As I only have an HDMI to HDMI cable. If it came with a USBC to HDMI cable then that would be acceptable, but they don't ever come with them.
They can't do anything if you don't have a usb c device to connect to it. Ethernet? Hdmi? A simple fucking memory stick?
I prefer if USB-C to whatever cables become a standard. That way I can get a cheap cable and plug it into whatever.
I just wish they would give us more than two ports, one of them is the power port anyway so technically they're only giving you one port, which I think is about three ports too few.
For those in particular, they had 2 and 4 TBT3 models.
It's not like the power port is power only, or even only power or accessory. It can do both at the same time.
It cannot do both at the same time. That is demonstrably untrue. It's either a power port or it's a data port and if it's been a power port then it is by definition not a data port.
I'm not sure why you think that's untrue, but it is true. I literally have a dock that provides power to my laptop, as well as connecting it to my monitors, keyboard, mouse, etc. all over one USB type C cable.
Because you're using an external device to extend the capabilities of the port. It can't do that without the dock, so now you have two things to carry around.
If you look at the comments on this, there are two distinct camps of people who will never agree: those who expect their laptop to be a self-contained unit that doesn't require anything that wasn't packaged with it to meet common use cases (which requires more ports), and those who are okay with docks and dongles and adaptors.
But only twice. You know the problem with having a network port on a usb is that the laptop no longer has a unique mac address, which can cause problems with authentication in a corporate environment. So when building devices or using mac auth it can be a nightmare.
MAC is useless as a component of the security check. It's trivial to change; either with a dongle, as you said, or in the network configuration of every major and minor OS.
But if i am authenticating a unique third party laptop i could use the mac address and apply a profile in clearpass to authenticate it and apply an ACL to lock the device down as a separate measure to creating a separate vlan for the device.
I wouldn't have called it useless in that regard. But im fairly new to network administration, so perhaps i am not well versed enough to know better.
Our clearpass servers struggle sometimes, and i experience timeouts or rejections when a laptop moves from one usb c docking station to another if they fail dot1x and revert to mab.
Also all of this aside, the fact that all the ports got removed from a laptop and now you have to plig in a £60-100 dock to get all those ports back is an absolute con.
There's always a MAC address, it's just the dongle's then.
But thats the dongles mac address. They break. They get passed around and used in multiple devices. If i am trying to authenticate a third party laptop and they are moving from dock to dock then i cant use the unique hardware ID to identify that hardware. I can only see where to dongle is.
In theory its all well and good saying the dongle will stay with the laptop or the mac isn't a useful tool for authentication. But in practice in the wonderful wild world of IT. Its never that straightforward.
Its crap for asset registers, its crap for authentication servers and its crap for finding devices on switches with mac address tables.
I know there are other ways, but network ports aside, why am i buying a £60-£100 docking station to get all those ports back? I had them in my laptop. Now i have to spend more money to get them back and rely on a bit of cheap hardware that needs drivers, updates, and has breakable wires and ports to provide the functionality that was built in to my older devices.
There are advantages, but they dont outweigh the disadvantages. They just make it cheaper to manufacture laptops.
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