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Comment by XorNot | Hacker News Reader

Apple burns almost all of their space savings on making the machine thinner, to the point of absurdity.

Apple is content to push everything into dongles (which you have to carry around anyway) to get it thinner. The point at which I can't have a wired RJ45 ethernet port is already ridiculous - that is not a thick connector. Same with fullsize USB ports.

Battery life there are hard limits as well: nobody is making a laptop with more then 100Wh, because that's the limit that you can carry onto an aircraft.

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People seem fine with it.

If you are bringing your laptop to a coffee shop, you probably won't need an ethernet port anyway, so you can leave the dongle at home. Lots of mobile use-cases don't involve plugging in to a ton of things, so why waste space having ports for it?

We're mostly programmers here, with nice keyboards and big screens as a necessity for work. On the other hand, lots of people are completely content with the base laptop. Making things easier for us at their expense is probably not a great business decision.

But lots of other mobile use case do involve plugging in to a ton of things. I would like to have the option to get the ports builtin. I am not arguing they should stop making those crippled variants without ports.

Luckily, macOS is going downhill as well, therefore my pain will end when the next version has not resemblance to a Unix system any more. The day Apple starts migrating its desktop OS to hamburger menus, I'll wipe and sell all my remaining Apple hardware.

They could make different models and operating systems for every niche I guess, but people who need lots of ports and a UNIX-like experience on a laptop are pretty far out in the tail of the distribution I think.

I dunno. I've never owned a macbook because Linux has been good enough for most of the time I've seriously been using computers for work stuff. Even if you aren't a Linux enthusiast, the time to switch for developers was more than a decade ago, IMO.

Agreed, the point when I start to have to choose any two of usb-tethered phone / usb to ethernet / usb to wifi headset / usb to serial really gets infuriating.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B079GSMZ7G/

While that's great an everything, my preferred option is less dongles, not daisy-chaining them...

Edit: Actually, didn't spot the Ethernet port on the first glance, might be worth a deeper look. :)

i have one of those, they work very well.

> a wired RJ45 ethernet port is not a thick connector.

……………

There are ultra-slim foldable RJ-45 connectors[1], which manufacturers could use if they could be bothered but they don't, because they would rather save the BOM cost of it and advertise the WiFi capabilities instead.

Only Fujitsu use them AFAIK.

[1]https://www.theverge.com/circuitbreaker/2017/12/8/16750574/p...

I don't see how that DOESN'T get broken on the second use, honestly.

Because it's meant for ultra-slim devices that will be docked on Thunderbolt 99% of the time and that foldable RJ-45 jack is for the "in case of emergency break glass" scenarios, that 1% of the time when you need to patch into a server physically without wasting time looking for a dongle, not for you to constantly plug/unplug ethernet cables in your laptop.

If your uses case requires you to constantly plug/unplug ethernet cables in your laptop then you need a workstation class laptop with a full sized RJ-45 jack, not a sleek thin and light.

That one yes. But Lenovo has great collabsible Ethernet ports that are very durable and this laptop is more than thick enough to house one.

One careless snag of the cable would have to rip the aluminum apart I would think

The connector's on the top, the bottom is simply a retention clip. If it breaks, you can replace it with tape, or simply resting the laptop on a surface while the cable is plugged in.

laptops without an rj-45 ethernet connector are just dumb.

it's perfectly feasible to integrate one.

just look a the dell latitude 7390. really, look at it:

https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/eB6gGRDZWSYT4XW6SeSMtf-120...

That's just a place to gather junk. People rarely use rj-45 these days, that's why it's not present on most laptops.

If by people you mean consumers, then yes, if you mean corporate/tech workers, then no.

I mean all people. When you work on the laptop you probably connect more things than a network => you have a dock => you don't need the rj45. So there might be negligible amount of corporate workers that need it, and some portion of tech workers, maybe. But overall, out of all customers, it's not enough for the hassle. Especially since it has drawbacks for the rest of the customers.

I don't think we even have a cable with RJ45 in the office I work in. Everyone's on Wi-Fi. All developers. Just saying.

In our case it's the opposite. Whole company is wired. No WiFi.

In our case it's the opposite. Whole company is WiFi. No wired.

we have it mixed: both wifi and wired are there. pick what's best for you.

I've seen them on some ASUS laptops as well.

I'm sorry who is using RJ45 ports on a laptop these days? Seems like that question was asked and answered years ago, and wifi has won.

Yo (hand up).

I mean. Really. That strikes me as willfully ignorant and arrogant. Clearly it's heavily used, especially in professional/corporate environments.

FWIW I use WiFi if I have to on the move.

But at home and office it's hard wire all the way.

In the office it's not even an option, everybody must.

At home, it's a quality of life thing.

The speed drops and disconnections and unpredictability of WiFi are not thing of the past yet. For some there's a security issue as well, real or perceived.

Wire just works.

Edit: other examples - gaming laptops; secure networks; dense environments either urban or corporate; anything that needs predictable connectivity, bandwidth and lag really :-/

Exactly the same applies to me.

Both my own laptop and the laptop from my employer (a large company) are used almost all the time on wired Ethernet, the main exception being during business trips.

"Clearly it's heavily used, especially in professional/corporate environments."

It's so clear that they removed it from their lineup? Clearly you're wrong. I have two Macbooks work/home, and a USB-C dock has been life changing in its awesomeness.

And yes my dock has RJ-45 ;)

Hmm I feel we're getting circular.

There are discussions on:

1. Is a particular connector still used/useful on laptops - my statement is that RJ45 is absolutely still used on laptops, and went into some examples / use-cases.

2. Separate discussion, hopefully informed by the first, is how do we do that - built into laptop or via a bunch of dongles.

Apple in particular removing it from their laptops does not speak one way or another to corporate/professional environment requirements. Their approach is "use a dongle/dock" which in their view is compatible with whatever use case is needed (and some people disagree, which is fine - lots of vendors and in particular HP/Dell/Thinkpad all have robust professional/corporate/roadwarrior models with dock, port and even pointing stick capability).

> It's so clear that they removed it from their lineup? Clearly you're wrong.

They also removed scissor switches, sd card readers and hdmi. But they're bringing those back (or have already), so they don't seem like a good authority to appeal to here.

Have they? Their newest laptops are USB-C only.

Kensington lock is widely used by enterprise (pro) but Apple won't support it. The "Pro" is just marketing comparing to "Air".

Welcome to dense urban environments, where the list of available wi-fi networks is well above fifty and the throughput well under 100 Mb/s on a good day... When I sit at my desk, I plug the RJ-45 and I get 1 Gb/s - no ifs, no buts !

I use mine nowadays, because my room is just far enough from the access point for occasion zoom drops. The 'better' solution would have probably been to put an access point right in my room, but I already have an RJ45 dongle + ethernet cord and I trust a cable connection to have less drops than wifi.

Hands up.

My laptop is sitting at home 1,5 m away from my Unifi access point and the network cable is still measurably more reliable and performant. Wifi might have won the amateurs.

At work when at my desk. If every device in the office were on Wifi, things would be a mess

USB-C Dock solved this problem for me.

I would say I run into a situation where I dig my RJ45 dongle out of my bag once per year still. Usually if I'm in a different office or trying to fix Wifi or something.

For me the dongle is annoying but probably sufficient.

I've also worked in offices where the Ethernet was better because it didn't require VPN access and was more reliable, but in those situations I plugged it into my monitor rather than directly into the laptop.

I've worked in many companies (both software and non-software) where ethernet was the only way to access the corporate network.

One had WiFi that only gave internet access, the other had no WiFi at all (in 2017).

Apart from what everyone else was already saying I have another cool use case: When transferring large files between two devices it's neat to be able to establish a point-to-point Ethernet connection between them, configure static IP addresses and netcat the files over it. It's fast, I don't need to encrypt anything and I'm not hogging anyone's bandwidth.

I use it on a regular basis to connect to industrial networks. Wireless is not typically available in that situation and for good reason.

Every single one of our laptops gets sent out with an accompanying Ethernet dongle. Every one.

Still very much useful in corporate environments.

Come on, that's ridiculous - wired LAN is more secure and faster than Wifi - anywhere I go, I prefer wired to Wifi.

Depends on who your audience is. HN crowd: give them an RJ45.

> I'm sorry who is using RJ45 ports on a laptop these days?

Everyone who understands collision domains.

Everyone who understands bandwidth.

I don't think you understand collision domains.

I understand that a WiFi LAN is one.

Every port on a switch is one.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collision_domain

> By connecting each device directly to a port on the switch, either each port on a switch becomes its own collision domain (in the case of half-duplex links), or the possibility of collisions is eliminated entirely in the case of full-duplex links. For Gigabit Ethernet and faster, no hubs or repeaters exist and all devices require full-duplex links.

"or the possibility of collisions is eliminated entirely in the case of full-duplex links."

So is a wifi connection full or half duplex?

I don't think you understand collision domains.

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