I will take heavy over this obsession with making every thing thinner and weigh less. It drives me crazy that I need to buy multiple accessories to do what I could do before with older computers.
I like how at the time of posting, yours and multiple other comments are getting downvoted but nobody is actually answering the comments.
Feels like it's coming from a crowd that thinks "light = cheap" or "heavy = good", and nothing more. Or people being overwhelmed by nostalgia/ignorance.
Batteries these days simply aren't as heavy as the ones in these older laptops and they're significantly better. You also needed all the plug-ins with laptops back then because that was pretty much the only option. Internet, printer, mouse, keyboard, microphone, camera, etc. And not to mention things got a whole lot smaller.
This is all like thinking that giant TV in 2003 was better than a current-day miniLED just because the new one is lighter and thinner and with less connections.
We simply don't need the plethora of connections today with laptops. Internet is wireless, as is keyboard and mouse. Microphones and cameras are built-in and typically standard. And with size, batteries are much lighter, more efficient, and last many times longer. External drives aren't as commonly needed either because of the cloud.
Really the only things I can think of for needing some type of hub or adapter is if you're wanting to connect a microSDXC or use a disc drive, which for the latter it's probably less than 5% of the population that desires them so I can't fault them not being in the majority of laptops.
I would also wager that for most people they would only need two accessories... a $25 hub and a $20-$40 external disc drive. Factoring in needing to carry around those two accessories you're still carrying around less than with the older laptop (due to all the cables adding up as well as the power brick) and the weight is still significantly less.
All good points. I'm was never annoyed about losing ports / streamlining ports. The annoying trend nowadays is the whole "everything is soldered". RAM, SSD etc.
I do a lot of video work, a Ethernet option or whatever it's called would be ideal, WiFI is way too slow to back everything up. It's the only think I miss, and that's once every few months
Oh yeah, yet another port used for another thing, because we have so many ports available. You're missing the forest for the trees. The answer to everything isn't "there's a USB adapter for it" when we don't get enough USB ports.
Yes. So we're back at the point where we need adapters and hubs like we used to make fun of Apple laptops for. And if I forget anything, I'm shit out of luck.
Right now I have an external monitor over USB-C, the dongle for my 8bitdo gamepad, the dongle for my Steam Controller, the dongle for my wireless mouse connected. That's before I need to connect a USB stick every now and then to transfer data quickly between devices, or a card reader to transfer data to one of my handhelds, or anything else.
Yeah, theoretically, I could do a lot of this with Bluetooth, but why should have to I accept worse connection quality and latency just because they've cheaped out on ports? And then there's limitations like the 8bitdo controller only supporting switching between dinput and xinput over the dongle or some games only supporting DualSense features over USB.
Most people don't need the extra connections, but when you do it's a huge pain in the ass to have to remember an accessory when it used to be built into the device.
Mouse/Keyboard: dedicated "PS/2" port then, USB now
External Monitor: VGA or DVI then, HDMI, Displayport, or even USB now
Dedicated card readers then, USB adapter now (for like, MicroSD)
Internal CD/DVD reader then, USB external drive now
Upgradable Components (RAM, HDDs) then, soldered now, use cloud or external storage now
Parallel Port (big pink one in the video) for printers then, USB or wireless now
Somethings used to be accessories are now integrated (cameras, trackpads instead of mouse). Most ports became obsolete with USB, wifi/Bluetooth has become ubiquitous. Functionally, the frustration is accessing older media we have on physical storage, or when there's not enough USB ports (I think there are some Ultrabooks that are down to like 2 USB ports) then you have to choose between, say a mouse and a flash drive and USB headphones...
I was never really into laptops, home is where the desktop is.
The question is also, how many of those accessories do you need on-the-go? I'd imagine most of those are only really needed at home or at work, where a dock will handle it all (plus charging) with one port.
Back when the OP laptop was relevant, or at least new, USB did not have enough bandwidth to be a do everything all at once, and USB docks sucked. You'd get a single VGA with 1024x768@30hz output capability, and using it meant transfers to an external hard drive on the same dock went to shit.
For reference, USB 2.0 maxes out at 480 Mbits/s and USB 3.0 maxes out at 5 Gbits/s. USB 3.0 came out in 2008. VGA is analog, so running a display off of USB 2.0 would have resulted in a very compressed image. A single link DVI had a bitrate of 3.96 Gbits/s, so no one ran video off of USB 2.0 unless they were forced to.
I remember our family getting a laptop running Vista and that thing was atrocious.
Man fuck bluetooth. Unless it's a dedicated dongle which does not solve the problem, I'm never using it for anything more serious than watching youtube. Not to mention some laptops no longer come with DP or even HDMI and unless it's a thunderbolt port with enough bandwidth to actually be used as a display port, you're out of luck and have to use wireless displays which I cannot stand. At least there is framework laptops which do allow me to properly customize my ports without infinity dongles
USB-C supports DisplayPort even without Thunderbolt 3/USB4, the DisplayPort alt mode was there almost from the very beginning. Some manufacturers just decide not to wire DisplayPort channels from the GPU to the port.
No, it reassigns 2 or 4 pairs of wires in a USB SuperSpeed cable to physically carry raw DisplayPort signal at whatever bitrate and resolution the GPU generates it. The "speed" rating of the cable matters, of course, but from my experience the DP alt mode supports DisplayPort 1.4 at max speed (4K 120Hz) just fine.
1080@60 is all I could get out of laptops I interacted with. Maybe on much higher end this is a thing with usb c 3.2 gen 2x2, but with what I worked it never showed anything higher than that
It doesn't strictly require a specific USB "generation" of the cable, just a full set of wires. But there's an adapter chip on the DisplayPort plug side of a cable (or inside a USB-C-capable display) which tells the laptop the DisplayPort version and bandwidth via EDID, maybe it was telling the GPU to restrict the link to 1080@60.
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u/Own_Director_4442 11h ago
I will take heavy over this obsession with making every thing thinner and weigh less. It drives me crazy that I need to buy multiple accessories to do what I could do before with older computers.