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Comment by makeitdouble | Hacker News Reader

I had that complaint when working in a 5 story building and spending a third of my awake hours in meetings here and there.

That 30$ dongle become either a dangling bit you'll have on your laptop all day, it will be hiting stuff, get under the laptop, or worse case scenario stuck between the screen and the keyboard when you don't pay attention. As it'd always dangling it also become loose over time and get flacky accordingly.

Back then having a HDMI port was standard, no dongle being the norm. So yeah, having the choice between needing a permanent dongle or not, the answer is obvious.

What changed for me is WFH, otherwise I thing I'd still wish for no dongle until USB-C projectors and displays rule the world.

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I have a monitor that acts as USB hub and power source, everything is plugged into it and then one single cable connects it and all of that and power to my company issued MacBook. Every meeting room used to have hdmi and DP and thunderbolt connectors but no more because every company issued laptop is now capable of thunderbolt (MacBook or dell precision series if you opt in for Linux)

If the company officially used many laptops with USB-C ports, it would make sense to have a USB-C to HDMI in every room with a projector, rather than making everyone carry their own.

Isn't plugging unknown USB-C-anything a huge security risk? It would be easy for a visitor to "forget" an evil adapter in a meeting room, and if employees are in habit of using them, boom.

Yes, I'm sure you could make one which acted as a USB-HDMI converter as well as a rubber ducky. sprinkle a few around, maybe bribe a cleaner to leave one in a meeting room, and you're set.

I think it's even easier than that; we now have cables that are normal shape and size of a USB connector that have an embedded system in them with a webserver, keyboard emulation, mass storage and wifi for a remote attacker to connect to.

It's also easier to just ask to quickly use the worker's computer to get a presentation going.

"Oh yeah sorry, my presentation is made in PowerShell instead of PowerPoint".

Yep. But so is a visitor dropping a bag of USB Mass Storage devices anywhere. Or a visitor with a proxmark grabber in his bag/suitcase.

Yes. Transition periods are always painful in that respect, worsened this time as a ton of “business” line windows laptops still have a HDMI port, same for Dell’s linux offering for instance.

When the first full USB-C Macs went out they definitely were the odd ones out in the company, and even now there’s still that split between run of the mill windows laptops and macs. Adaptors are more common, but it’s still not great.

> worsened this time as a ton of “business” line windows laptops still have a HDMI port, same for Dell’s linux offering for instance

This should not matter as long as they also have a fully functional USB-C (which I'd guess they do).

It plays more on the "why don't you just ... ?" question that raises when you ask for adapters being standard in every room.

It reminds me of asking to include decaffeinated pods in our recurring coffee orders for the espresso machine. The person had no opinion on coffee, but wasn't convinced they needed to accommodate for the minority that was concerned.

Luckily, we could always make it worse; there were times where full-sized ports were thought of standard yet we had PCs and Macs with mini-versions that were specific to the manufacturer (like mini-composite, AV-jacks, mini-VGA, mini-DVI).

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