Technology

to be fair, the bandwidth of all the ports on the bottom laptop probably fit in 1 (maaaaybe 2? Just spitballing here) Thunderbolt 5 ports depending how fast the ethernet port is. BTW, why would you want a port that isn't reversible like USB C lol...

I miss having a thousand different cables to keep track of /s

really, all we need is the companies to start packing those laptops with thunderbolt3 or equivalent USB-C (USB 4). I love the old ports, but they were unnecessary. I'd rather the industry finally takes on the open thunderbolt standard and we're all good to go. With 10 thunderbolt ports you have 10 HDMI, or 10 USB, or 10 Ethernet, or 10 headphone jacks, or 10 RJ45 or whatever you need + PCIe tunneling.

The desktop equivalent is "What happened to all my PCIe expansion slots?!"

(Note: processor PCIe lane count has gone up, used to be like 16 from CPU, 4 from chipset, since a GPU didn't need an x1x6 in terms of bandwidth - see SLI/crossfire. These days, it's just that many lanes go to M.2, with each using up to 4 lanes - vs having 6 SATA driven off the chooser)

Look how they massacred my boy.

And there's the soldered RAM and storage, and glued-in or screwed-in battery...

I'm no Apple fanboy (never owned a product of theirs and never will) but to be fair, those two USB-C ports can do everything the old, removed ports can do and more. The real crime here is not putting enough of them on the laptop.

Edit: The only port I'll lament the removal of is the headphone jack. USB-C headphones are rare, adapters get lost, and bluetooth headphones compress the audio and have input lag. Everything else can go, though, and won't be missed. (Okay fine ethernet can stay too.)

As someone who daily drives a laptop for work and does field work on server facilities, finding a modern replacement that has both a RJ45 port and square USB (USB-A?) ports available on both sides, has been a pain in the hassle.

And I'm not even crying over the loss of VGA any longer. That one I can live without.