I remember dongle life, they popped up in the very late 90’s and survived until like 2008ish. They sucked then, and they really suck now. And yes, I still think having an all in one USB “dongle” is worse than having built in functionality.
then again, I have a framework, so it’s kinda moot lol.
You can get laptop “hubs” which usually have a few USB ports, a video connector or two (often HDMI and/or DisplayPort), ethernet, and some will function as a power cable, too (one of mine does and one doesn’t).
https://sh.itjust.works/pictrs/image/2e42ac06-9a45-47b3-83c8-3402f159ee6b.webpIf you don’t have a dongle, the dongle is basically just hidden inside (a chip on the main board or an extension card). Being able to add dongles is a very easy way to quickly add things like wifi. Otherwise you’d have to open the PC and mount a card and the number of slots inside is also limited. So yeah, builtin is good, but also no, dongles can be better. It’s just a different option.
I think the point was universal dongle with universal BLE / radio protocol. It could still have different encryption schemes and keys for each device / manufacturer by upgrading / installing drivers (so in software), but at least the radio packet protocol would be the same which would keep the hardware universal. Kind of like how smart home hubs (WiFi +/ Zigbee +/ Bluetooth +/ 433MHz / etc) work.
But we all know how creating a new “universal” protocol goes from experience (ie USB “standards”).
I guess you could use the same argument to say you’re buying less when you buy your laptop. It’s just arbitrary data I/O through USB with the software level interpreting it. They don’t have to ship a DAC or wifi radio (if they actually omitted that) or… whatever you call the component that’s part of a GPU that converts to HDMI - instead they offload that to the dongle or peripheral. In effect your device is just slowly being whittled down to a processor to USB bridge.
The headphone and USB ones are the ones I hate the most. My “flagship” phone doesn’t work with any of my ~15 pairs of headphones (mostly earbuds but a few actually nice ones) without an adapter. Booting up a laptop into a nix OS that doesn’t have wpa_supplicant etc. installed, no ethernet dongle or ethernet port, that’s about to be annoying.
This is more about laptops/phones than desktops btw. Normal sized desktops usually still ship with every port, plus one or two USB-C’s these days.
I think the annoyance comes from not having that many ports to begin with. If I had a whole bunch of ports, it wouldn’t matter as much if I had to snap on a usb-c adapter to all the cables.
What is annoying is having to unplug something i need so I can plug in a flash drive
They have many options depending on your needs. If you want it to charge your laptop through the dock / hub, ensure that it has power pass through functionality.
yeah i have a few of them and they all get extremely hot, plus they look ugly as hell. usually a super short cord so right where my mouse would be is a blazing hot ugly box with a bunch of cables and junk sticking out. and if you accidentally jiggle it or move the laptop too much the whole thing blanks out for a second interrupting work flow.
Some of both. I remember a time where it felt like every time I got a new computer it had some different ports because they kept evolving. Modem/Ethernet, firewire 400/800, keyboard/mouse/USB, VGA/DVI/Displsyport(and mini versions of some). Sure, my old computer might have had a lot of different ports, but I might never have used some of them. For something like a laptop, I think 2x USB-C on each side is good for most, plus add hubbing to larger peripherals like HDD enclosures and displays and docks wouldn’t have to be so popular.
I feel like we’re just in the middle of a good transition period. Few years from now almost everything that can will be USB-C, we’re really just waiting out the replacement of all the existing devices and their incompatible ports.
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