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Comment by munk-a | Hacker News Reader

I really can't stand the trend to keep making things thinner - it's gotten to the point where it's hard to find a work laptop I can get through my company that comes with an ethernet port. If we can miniaturize stuff so well then can't we miniaturize it all to spread components further apart in a predominantly empty but tall case so airflow stops being an issue?

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I used to think apple was obsessed with thinness, but I think that's actually the byproduct of what they're actually obsessed with: weight. While they might seem like the same thing, and they are obviously related... I don't care so much about the change in thickness from an aesthetic standpoint, but I do appreciate that the latest generation of macbook pros are noticeably lighter in my hand and on my back. So, I can see one practical reason for doing it.

That’s all fine until they use this as an excuse to remove a drive, or a headphone port, or prevent you from changing the battery, and then refuse to admit they aren’t meeting the needs of their customers.

The only thing that is above there needs of their customers is needs of their shareholders.

What makes you think it’s an excuse to remove those, as opposed to the reason they did so? What do you think their real motivation is?

All Apple provides us is correlation, so it's entirely possible (likely even) that the removal was incidental and driven by competing internal needs (like removal of wires, progression towards thinness). Materially it doesn't matter at all what caused this because they don't offer phones with functionality people clearly desire that are otherwise commonplace.

It'd be much nicer if they simply offered things like removable battery, headphone, etc, and articulated how this would affect the form of the phone, but that would affect other priorities that Apple has. It's not difficult to accept, even on this forum, that materially their massive profit margin hurts their product offering.

Progression towards weight doesn’t sound to me like an excuse for ... doing it for progression towards thinness. Which was what your parent comment was talking about their motivation being. I, by the way, am an iPhone user who wishes they kept the jack.

I’m also not sure what you mean by their profit margin hurting their product offering. Do you mean their desire to keep iPhones an aloof luxury brand hurts their product offering? I suppose dropping surprises like removing jack X or button Y could be part of that, but I think it’s more likely they have found customers with different preferences than you or I to be a preponderance of their user base and decided that making us happier is not economically worth a totally separate mechanical design that they have to both manufacture and separately stock. Maybe they incited people to move to airpods, but their forced converts seem to largely like them.

The two aren’t really related tough. If you took the current MacBook and made it twice as thick, but kept all the same internal components, it might weigh an ounce more from the extra case metal. The rest would be air.

The MacBook Pro 16-inch is definitely not light. It's weird because I'm used to being able to hold a laptop in one hand.

I agree that Apple's behavior isn't quite consistent with a simple obsession with thinness, but I don't think it's weight, either.

My 15" PowerBook in 2001 was 2.4 kg. The 15" MacBook Pro in the linked answer is 1.83 kg. (At their heaviest, they got to about 2.5 kg.) This seems like a lot of trouble for half a kilo (-25%). It also got much thinner over that time, from 2.5 cm to 1.5 cm (-40%).

It's probably a combination of factors. Jony Ive in 2001: "People will have a visceral reaction to its weight and volume."

Hey, I'm happy to have optimizations around weight and I understand that internal jacks and cards to handle specialized lines adds weight, but an integrated jack is going to add a lot less overall weight than a dongle and, while not everyone uses ethernet, I think it's at least common enough to justify keeping the jack around.

At work we all use laptops to allow working from home and we're also all hardwired in because there's no way we'd have reliable throughput over wifi with the multitude of employee work & personal devices our network supports.

I got a Lenovo X1 Carbon that is pretty thin and have a adapter for Ethernet, good enough for me and doesn't seem to have any performance issues. The form factor of the X1 makes me really love it.

But when it comes to smartphones, I agree. They are getting thinner and larger, possibly to make it easier to drop and break or something, because I sure don't get it. It's hard to find a good, reliable smartphone that is around 4 inches today so I can hold it without worry with one hand.

I have big gorilla hands and I can't really use my Pixel 3a one-handed. A smaller phone would be nice.

I have the carbon too, but I also have a Dell which is a similar thickness but with a drop down sprung Ethernet port. Annoying Lenovo couldn’t fit the same.

Maybe because Dell has a patent on that port?

HP laptops use spring ethernet port too, even very cheap ones.

Thinner fits the general use case better probably, e.g. there's way more students who care about a laptop that can fit between textbooks than IT professionals who must have an Ethernet port on hand at all times.

Also, sweet money from selling all sorts of adapters (I think by now I spent at least 1/3rd of what I paid my 2017 MBP on dongles, docks.. this one correctly turns on the display on resume, this one doesn't but passes 4k without hiccups, etc)

But how many students but MacBook Pros?

Can only speak for Denmark, where I'm from, but I'd venture that at least 50% of students have MacBook Pros. This is simply based on personal experience though. I might be way off. This is for the last three years of High School equivalent. University varies a lot depending on your field.

Honest question: why do you need ethernet onboard a laptop? USB-C ethernet interface adapters are cheap; could you not simply get a few and leave them on the ends of the ethernet cables to which you regularly attach?

These days, for most users (you and I included), very rarely if ever is wifi inadequate. If, for speed or security reasons physical ethernet is needed, the adapters are small and cheap.

I don’t understand the dongle hate.

Dongles are annoying for moving about and they are One More Thing to worry about.

I'm also personally unimpressed with USB-C port stability, unlike USB-A connectors USB-C seems to have a lot of natural wiggle in it and the weight of dongles can wrench the cable out.

I'm on a Dell XPS now, and formerly a MBP 2015, so I haven't had a physical ethernet port in a really long time. I still miss it— I work at a robotics company, and a lot of my job revolves around the installer workflow (pxe, kexec, that kind of stuff), driver development (lasers, PLCs, and other devices that all speak Profinet and similar ethernet-based protocols), not to mention general fault investigation for when a robot "falls off the network" but can still be accessed over a wired last-ditch rescue interface.

So yes, I have dongles at my desk and there are stashes of them around the office, but it's still a source of frustration when they go missing, don't work, etc. I know I'm a bit of a special case, but I would definitely still appreciate a computer that was 50% thicker with a proper ethernet port.

My wife’s HP laptop has a spring loaded full sized jack that pops out. It adds no thickness and the laptop cost $300, there’s no ethernet jack on the Mac not because they can’t but they don’t want one.

> USB-C ethernet interface adapters are cheap

Well, I know what you mean, but... I have a macbook for work and when we all converted to work from home, I needed to buy a USB-C ethernet adapter, thunderbolt adapter, and a USB-C to "old" USB adapter, and was shocked to find out that each one was $30-$40. I guess that's cheap in the grand scheme of things, but it would be nice if this stuff was still bundled into the computer.

My company provides them, but we buy off-brands and I assume in bulk. I asked IT about it once - could it really be that much cheaper? - and turns out yes, it's substantially cheaper, especially at scale.

I guess my point is, don't be afraid of off-brand dongles!

We need(ed) them extensively for lab hardware access in the office. It's accessible over wi-fi and VPN but we often need a wired connection to directly test hardware functionality and performance.

So last year after people kept losing their dongles we starting keeping USB-C dongles always plugged into the cable ends. Adds $20-$40 to every person-facing ethernet outlet, but nobody ever lacks one, and we noticed more people using Ethernet as a result because of how much faster and more stable it is than our wi-fi.

If anyone not new or transient to the office took the dongle off the cable, they got shamed very, very deeply. YMMV (we are a very shame-effective group) but buying 15 dongles once ended up being cheaper than buying 10 dongles, then 5 a few months later, then another 5, then oops we found the 5 that we thought were lost...

With those $800 you could have a bought a really good 802.11ac WiFi router for the lab?

With all this remote work happening due to Covid-19 I think video conferencing is making clear the issues with trying to push a high amount of data through a congested airspace. Even at home in a concrete building I have plenty of channel interference and regularly get dsyncs from spotty wifi when gaming over my LAN with my wife.

A friend of mine works in an office where you need a hardline for the network and there's one coworker always leaving his USB-C adapter on the hotseat cat5s, and always complaining when others in the office take them off and repeatedly lose them.

I imagine it's probably as much of an inconvenience for everyone who has the port to take off the dongle and worry about losing it as it is an inconvenience for people who need the dongle in the first place. The solution to both seems to be "only distribute laptops that have the ports your business needs for daily work", but unfortunately companies don't seem to agree.

I keep a USB-c Ethernet plugged into my monitor which acts as a USB hub + uses a single cord to both power and connect the usb devices.

It’s nice only having to plug one thing in when I start working with a monitor.

I don’t need Ethernet when I’m on the go or browsing in bed. Like most people...

Thing is... most people don't use ethernet anymore, at least for notebooks. So it makes sense that your options are limited.

The thing is most people don’t use Macs or even personal computers for that matter anymore. It’s never been about a massive appeal product, it’s about meeting people’s needs. I think Apple remembers the good old days when they got rid of the CD ROM and everyone went from doubting it to patting them on the back and saying what a good job they did calling the trend.

Even in 2020, a professional computer is not really professional IMO if it does not have an ethernet jack. Even my wife’s $300 cheapo HP laptop has a drop-down ethernet jack, it adds no thickness. There is no technical or form limiting reason not to have an ethernet jack.

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