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Comment by rrrrrrrrrrrryan | Hacker News Reader

I don't think repairability is the big deal here. It's the customizable ports.

Pretty much everyone's laptop has at least one port they literally never use, and is missing a port they wished it had. E.g. I'll literally never use the SD card slot, nor the 1/8" audio jack, but right now I really wish it had one oldschool USB port. In a year or two, it might be nice to swap that out for an extra usb-C.

This laptop design is a dongle-eliminator.

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It's a dongle-eliminator, but it also affords a form of traditional dongle fetishism in that nothing stops fetishists from carrying around the excess port-blocks they so desire, and swapping in the field when needed.

Thanks for pointing this out. It’s a micro-hoarding type behavior that collectors share (stamps, trading cards, mechanical keyboards, etc). It’s fulfilling that compulsion and not anything else. The mechanical keyboard people especially, most of those keyboards are ‘meh’, but they compulsively get those and new keys.

I am not attacking the hobby, I am only attacking the obsessed who will insist their fetish is not so, and that whatever they are doing has an inordinately higher value proposition. It doesn’t, you’re just a collector. Join the miniature train set people.

Does anyone else miss PCMCIA? I do!

Some Dell laptops used to have these plastic cages around their hard drives, so you could take out a single screw and cold-swap drives in 10 seconds, no need to open the case. Same to pop in a sound card, ethernet card, USB card, SD card reader, etc. Still my favorite "hacker laptop". Lost it somewhere in Vegas during a bender at DEFCON. Thank goodness for hard drive encryption.

If you're clever, you can usually hotswap that drive too, since it's just a dumb SATA port. More convenient to do with the CD-bay 2.5" drive caddies.

What's funny is that the "customizable ports" are really just... nested dongles. They all use USB-C (or thunderbolt 3? not sure) and just have enough space for USB-A, SD cards, HDMI, etc. That's a pretty powerful thing that thunderbolt enables.

What's wrong is Apple's "all thunderbolt 3" approach to laptop connectivity. Nobody wants a ton of dongles hanging off of their laptop.

If you have hardware which doesn't support USB-C, or you want to have external storage in one of your ports, it is perfect. For all the other uses, you can just get one of the USB-C ports (or pull the dongle out if you're thrifty/cheap).

> What's funny is that the "customizable ports" are really just... nested dongles.

You know what though? The port seems like such a common point of failure. I _hate_ having to fiddle with my USB connection like I'm trying to tune and aerial antenna. If I can fix that by just replacing a cheap/pluggable port piece I'm all for that.

... nested dongles that are safe inside your computer instead of free-floating in your bag, or in your home somewhere separate from your computer.

Agreed, my laptop now has 2 USB-C, 1 USB-A, a microSD, and a headphone jack. I would absolutely swap the second USB-C for a USB-A, and the microSD for an SD. Or some days an ethernet jack.

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