Why Are Laptop Ports Disappearing

Imagine all the stuff becoming wireless and then someone blasts their area with a jammer.

I spent the day setting up a new laptop for my new job. The company sent me the attachments because there are only a few ports on the new laptop. I also noticed that my personal laptop does not have an ethernet port.

And as I am looking into security systems for my new home I am leaning towards hard wired vs WIFI. Especially when there are stories about the WIFI being jammed shutdown the home security system.

If there are no USB ports left on a laptop, how are operating systems supposed to be reinstalled if it won't boot?

I want as much wired devices as I can get. More secure that way.
Everything I have is USB A, plug in speakers, and 15 pin monitor connection.
I have yet to EVER find a battery that lasts more than 1/2 day. Watch one movie regularly and the battery is almost depleted an hour after that.
Advertised battery power is with a DIM screen, throttled cpu, and little else running.
Who wants to squint when trying to read a dim screen?
Note: all that radiation from wireless can't be good for you....

We are evolving, but just backwards

Does that multi-cable actually exist?

The goal is to turn your laptop into a terminal/TV where all your data is stored in "The Cloud" and you compute/stream from that "Cloud" as needed. Nothing important would be allowed to be archived offline in your home.

And when the one and anly port fail, you can not use the laptop.
You can not even charge it.
Then you need to buy a new one, because the repair is too expensive.

Innovation by their marketing teams

cheaper

I have a thick laptop with several ports, and a USBC hub. I have no bluetooth devices attached to either my personal or work computers. What would I attach - a battery powered device that will need charging by wire frequently and have a communication delay? Nope.
Sad to say, we need a USB D. Call it USD instead. And, it needs to do everything all the time, no exceptions, no value cutting, no feature cutting, just a full port that does it all. Like USB c was supposed to be.

What's really futuristic is a laptop like Framework which lets you choose your ports and change them whenever you want.

Yay, let's generate even more electronic waste, polluting environment by abandoning stable and proven technology! Hope those companies either rebase to tradition (or at least not completely cut it off), or get destroyed.
Where's Greta Thunberg when you need her? She needs to step in here and say "How dare you", and not focus on other nonsense she does...
Also, can anyone here see the privacy concerns how everything goes wireless and cloud-based, it creates some Orwellian dystopian scenario?
Don't trust the internet to not leak any of your private data, creation, or intellectual property, that'd get stolen by someone who could misuse that!
Won't happen to you if you're offline and use physical connections.

The topic is interesting but you repeated the same thing for 11 minutes...

Don't know about BT5.0 but what I do know is that BT in general is a huge PIA. You can't have more than one device connected at a time, or at least I haven't been able to on my Yoga laptop. Even then, I still have issues connecting to older BT devices such as my Bose Soundlink Mini speaker.

This kind of degradation of connectivity options is going to happen only as much as (dumb stupid) people throwing money at these dumbed down ''innovative'' devices. Look at Apple and Nvidia fanboys, how passionately they defend the overpriced mediocre tech the Apple and Nvidia manufactures - this kind of idiocy only fuels greedy corporations further.

USB-C, but that still adds bottlenecks

Wireless sucks and has interference issues!

Whew the "Ps" are coming strong through microphone 😮

The number 1 thing I hate about bluetooth and wireless technologies is 2 things: Latency and Drop Outs.

I love my Airpods pros, especially when going out, but when I'm at home, a lot of times, the audio just cuts randomly out of nowhere because of the interfering signals happening in my building. When I connect my wired IEM's into my laptop machine, I don't get that issue at all.

Also, imagine playing a competitive video game where zero is the limit for latency. You're gonna really struggle to compete with a wireless mouse whereas a wired mouse will get you through just fine.

As much as I love usb-c, many things sill require a USB-A and HDMI connection. It's nice to see apple adding back the SD Card and HDMI slots with the latest macbook pro lineups, but this isn't always the case with other manufacturers.

Laptops are becoming 💩 just like everything else in the "tech" world. Gaming laptops and mobile workstations are the last stand.

One kind of port that can do everything is fine ... but include enough of them!

If you will buy laptops with more ports, the ones without ports will disappear

What the name of that movie shown briefly near the start?

Short answer: Manufacturers are completely out of touch with reality. Wireless isn't always an acceptable solution, not to mention the security concerns.

When buying a new laptop I have a check list, 4 or more USB ports, Check...HTML port Check...Eithernet port Check....Optical Disk Read/Write (yeah, I'm old school) Check.....Card Read Check....expandable ram....Check.....big arsed HD.....Check......If a machine is missing any to these, then its a hard pass.......I don't want a slim sexy piece of eye candy to impress the hipsters or whatever with.....I want a machine I can work with and has the capabilities I need.

As for the cooling issues.....my newest machine got rather toasty, so broke down and got an external twin fan cooling base for it to sit on, job done, problem solved. Of and cloud storage can bite my hairy royal Canadian arse. Got a couple of stand alone HD's to store and back up my files on......A company I worked with used cloud storage, and lost all their data when a disgruntled employ with unfettered access wiped it clean before he quit and walked out the door.

I won't buy a laptop without port period.

= I have never (EVER) had a WiFi or Blu-Tooth work as well ( if at ALL ) or as speedily, as a WIRED Port !!!
...
IMHO
...

Can I find an 8" floppy drive with Blue Tooth connectivity to recover my historic files?

It's stupid and limiting and in future it will be extremely difficult to move or archive aging media or software

I FUCKING LOVE MY USELESS POSTCARD THIN LAPTOP

my old lenovo has even an lpt port lol

We decided simply not to replace our current laptops. Saves a lot of money.

Then you put your slim notebook into a bulky bag because you're going somewhere and want to protect it. Gone are the volume savings. I would say the is with phones. You put the phone into a cover because it is too smooth and small to hold and stick a finger holder onto the back because you don't want to drop your 1000 dollar phone.

I don't *WANT* a super-thin laptop. I want a laptop that is sturdy and doesn't crumple if I breathe on it the wrong way. I want my laptop to be configurable and usable for MY needs, not to augment the donut-and-sushi budget of some lazy corporate manglers and MBAs. Until such time as I have money to buy a Framework laptop, I'll stick with used older-model ThinkPads, or whatever older-model Dell/HP/Acers I find at flea markets or tag sales (I do various test configurations, so I have multiple machines).

gamers NEED an ethernet port! using wifi is NOT recomended and should use plug! plus with plug can turn off the TOXIC wifi when its not in use.

I dunno... I found myself rolling my eyes a few times during this video. It all comes down to buy the computer that fits your use case. All the gripe about professional users NEEDING ports on laptops, for instance. It's not like people have only 1 model to choose from. Professional users will take time to order a laptop with the ports they need, and the other 99 percent will just buy a big box special and will be perfectly happy. Laptops are portable and disposeable. Most people nowadays want laptops for portability or space savings (i.e. a dorm room pc), and not a chugging work horse. Cool thing is people can still order heavy chonky big money laptops if they want em, and more power to em. Then again, I despise laptops, so what do I know lol

My 2020 Triton 300 has 2 USB A 3.0, 1 USB 2.0, HDMI, Mini DP, Ethernet, Combo Headset and 1 USB C. Its plenty for me I do miss the SD card Slot but any device where I would need one I can just use USB A to connect it. Sadly I do dislike the lack of ports in newer laptops which is why I have been dragging my feet to upgrade. My RTX 2070 can run games plenty fine well into 2025

they probably do it to cut cost but still selling it at higher price for profit. 😂

This is why my next laptop is going to be a Framework. I can build my laptop and pick my ports.

That's why i have my Editing Laptop for my things.. This one has 4 USB Ports, DVD Drive, HDMI and VGA, Ethernet Port, and a beefy CPU Cooler, it has i3-3120m and 16GB of DDR3. Yes, DDR3 on 2025. This is more for light gaming and office works, but it gets my job done with this, also used it to render Blender stuffs, but i will be also using it whenever i wanna animate for my contents.

They slimmed it down makes you buy dongles which might break the darn cable making you buy again.

My old Acer laptop has an unused port which i found out i can DOCK it. Yes, a dock with good and cool unique features.

I can still upgrade that guy with i7, the max it supported but that means i have to upgrade the cooler for it, thankfully it's beefy so... It has an 256GB SSD Boot drive, and i might have to buy an Adapter to replace that rubbish DVD Drive that i don't use anymore with something that allows me to install back the 1TB ;)

It's conspiracy...

My Dell notebook is 4 years old, in daily use. And it got 3 USB-C ports. 1 of them isn't working anymore. That's ok because I still got two working and I don't bother using a USB hub. But what if it was my only one?

As of now, I can still download my favorite Linux and write it to a USB drive, boot my machine from that, and hence install a truly free operating system. Just like I did back in the day with Linux booted from a CD or even floppy disk. In a world without ports, this would be so much more difficult. That alone is reason enough for me to never buy a laptop without proper ports.

Along these lines, the Framework laptops have a pretty neat solution for being both slim as well as functional. All the ports are modular. So you can have USB-C, USB-A, HDMI, Displayport, Ethernet, a card reader, or even extra SSD storage, all in the form plug-in modules.

Never ever in my life checked the thickness of my notebook, portable workstation (essentially my video editing gear), tablet or phone.
The thinner it is, the $hitti*r is the portfolio of ports and connectors.

So Rudi was right? Black people are selling USB ports like crack?

No WiFi can do the ease, speed and security of Ethernet cable. My old eMachine has either net, but not my Asus Chromebook does not.

Usb C is replacing everything. Even HDMI and headphones jack. I used to use USB C headphones, just because I liked it, before switching to Bluetooth ones, because of the air pods hype. I don't need so many cables simultaneously. I personally use track pad. I only connect my charger in case. Just like into my phone. It has an SD card reader for productivity, just like my phone. I can use cloud or messenger even to replace it. All I need is a charger. And I switch between my devices

The PC manufactures are using this cry as an excuse to make more money.

simple dont buy laptops without many ports. my laptop has 9 ports.

Lmao, thanks for the video, we had the situation just today in the office, colleague with a surface needed to plug in a usb drive. I didn't pay much attention first, but as it took him ages to do it, I started wondering wtf is going on.
Seems his usb hub was not working he said, so I asked, why don't you just use another port. And then the others started laughing maniacally - THERE IS NO OTHER PORT.

But honestly, at the end of the day, the decision is yours: DO NOT buy this slim s**t and buy only devices that have a sensible number of ports.

More Details: for me a minimum of 4x USB ports is a requirement (ideally split 3-1, or 2-2) , I wont buy anything with less.
And it has to have at least an hdmi port. (tho hdmi is another dirty story, i'd much rather have DP, but the idiotic TV manufacturers never add those to their consumer TVs ...)

Without ethernet ... oh well, usually is ok without it for me and I guess i can live without that, the ethernet can be in the x-in-1 usb-c dongle if really needed.