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Comment by the_other | Hacker News Reader

But why the dongles? The go against all the principles of the rest of the design. They’re proprietary, consumable, and they waste space in the chasis. They limit what you can do with the USB-C they pass through too.

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They are actually open-source[1] so you can print your own case in a 3d printer and put the circuit you want inside. About the USB-C limitation, I initially thought it was a limitation too but Im not sure after learning that you can use them as thunderbolt ports. Anyway, I think the notebook seems to be thin enough and the possibilities of dongle are exciting[2] - like magsafe chargers[3] (which seems to have some patent problems).

[1] https://community.frame.work/c/expansion-cards/developer-pro...

[2] https://community.frame.work/t/what-new-expansion-card-types...

[3] https://community.frame.work/t/youtuber-elevated-systems-mak...

They're not totally proprietary, they've even released designs CC-BY that you can use to make your own: https://github.com/FrameworkComputer/ExpansionCards

Only a guess but they also act as a sacrificial device in place of the motherboard's USB-C connector. I've read here on HN that Macbook USB-C adapters regularly fail.

Louis Rossmann recently reviewed the Framework laptop and basically said the exact same thing, about them taking a lot of the stress off the soldered USB-C portion and transferring it to the chassis instead.

I think I read somewhere that they were planning to open up the specs of those modular ports. That may alleviate some of the points you bring up. (Can't find the source right now though.)

In what way do they limit the USB-C they pass through?

> In what way do they limit the USB-C they pass through?

GP means that if you use one other than the USB-C pass-through module, it's (trivially) a proper subset of the USB-C functionality that you started out with.

I don't really see the issue: the alternative is that you do that in a dongle more external to the laptop anyway?

What do they limit? You mean when you're using one of the non-usb-c ones that that's limiting you?

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