[tritium]

DongleGate™ arguably started (and was likely internally fomented) with this edition of the MacBook Pro.

This was the first MacBook Pro to exclude an ethernet port, and when Desktop Support at my company handed it to me, I looked at it and asked them what the fuck was I supposed to do about it? They shrugged, threw up their hands and left (I was the prima donna that asked for the Mac, figure it out asshole), and so I limped along on guest wi-fi for a week, until figuring out that I had to buy a dongle if I wanted to use wired ethernet. Eventually snagged some from desktop IT services too, but initially, they were callous and indifferent to my plight.

If anything seeing the statistics for the successful sales of this model and related essential dongle accessories, despite knee-capping ethernet, and forcing dongle adoption to replace an old, standard, widely reliable and convenient data bus standard, could only have inspired and emboldened choices like the headphone jack debacle and USB-C minimalism which still plague us even today.

[simonh]

DongleGate is a real thing, I'm actually putting off getting a new MPB until I get my head around what I can and cannot use different USB-C connectors for, but honestly dropping wired ethernet along with the optical drive was the right thing to do.

There has to be a balance between features on the device and the number of people that will end up ever using them. Hardly anyone uses wired ethernet these days, so expecting the tiny percentage that do (most of whom are probably on HN knowing my luck) to use a dongle is a justifiable decision.

The USB-C debacle is not justifiable. It's a stupid, necessary mess that will affect almost everybody at some point or other.

[JHonaker]

Hardly anyone at home, maybe. I still plug my desktop into wired at home, and the vast majority of computers at work have wired dock stations that work so much better than the WiFi in the building.

I don’t think you can honestly say hardly anyone uses wired Ethernet.

[sincerely]

I'd put money on 90%+ of desktops being wired, but in the context of laptops, it's a pretty reasonable statement to make.

[tritium]

  Hardly anyone uses wired ethernet...

Au contraire! Anyone familiar with wi-fi security knows better than to trust the flimsy authentication protocols, and even flimsier application layer implemntation of the user interfaces that control and behave as lock and key for the (more difficult to crack) actual encryption that protects the traffic itself.

Wireless communication is often attacked at the joints, by targeting the login handshakes that relay the password-oriented auth tokens back and forth, when confirming access. These side channel attacks on encryption are more likely to succeed than trying to capture a terabyte of traffic, in order to crack the encryption itself.

Anyone tasked with the technical aspects of handling millions of dollars securely, is likely to be avoidant of wi-fi for some select activities, where convenience is not the priority. If you know you're a spear phishing target, there are certain things you don't do over wi-fi.

[rtpg]

It obviously depends on your use-case, but in my case I have the LG monitor recommended for the MPB.

This monitor serves as a secondary display, a laptop charger, _and_ a USB-C hub. I ended up throwing a USB hub on my desk connected to the monitor for keyboard + mouse.

When I get to my desk, I plug in one cable to the computer and everything works. I know that ThinkPad people have had this sort of stuff for ages, but it's much nicer than my old workflow of magsafe + display port + USB setup.