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25 points johnnybzane | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.232s | source

I'm on the market for a new laptop (with windows OS) and I've noticed quite a few laptops are USB-C ports only now.

I even saw one laptop that only had 2 USB-C ports, with 1 of them to use for charging. (Dell XPS 13 for example)

It's very important for me to connect my laptop to a monitor, and to use earbuds, be connected to ethernet, and to have a charger going, all at the same time. I have an old laptop with an HDMI output port, USB, and direct audio jack for earbuds.

I'm struggling to accept that dongles are fast enough or reliable enough. What if I get a HDMI dongle or audio dongle and the connection keeps dropping on my video calls? A direct connections feels "safer" to me than a USB-C splitter.

What do you think. Should I still look for laptops with direct HDMI/Audio/USB connections, or are USB-C only laptops still reliable enough even if you need a dozen different dongles?

1. hnbad ◴[] No.41922518[source]
If you're going to connect to a monitor most of the time, the ports don't matter as long as you can connect a docking station. If you're going for Windows that probably means USB-C with Tunderbolt 3, or Surface Connect (the proprietary connector used by the Surface line of devices and laptops).

If you need to work in more than one place frequently enough that you want monitors there, buy two docking stations. Compared to the laptop itself they're extremely cheap. Docking stations allow the one cable going to your laptop to act as your power cable, your HDMI cables, your audio cable, your ethernet cable, your USB cables to your external camera etc, and so on, all at the same time.

Another benefit of docking stations is that you only need to handle a single cable when unplugging or connecting your laptop. This may save you a few minutes but more importantly it will also reduce the hassle by reducing the number of things that can go wrong and that you have to pay attention to. If there's no docking station from your laptop's manufacturer just make sure it supports Thunderbolt 3 and get a docking station compatible with that, e.g. the ones from Lenovo. They also almost always come with multiple video ports.

Yes, there are scenarios where you might not want to lug around an entire docking station but still would like to be able to connect something to your laptop other than a power cable, e.g. when giving a presentation externally, but in those cases just bring a USB-C dongle for whatever you need. You're probably not going to need to set up an entire workstation for that and if you do need a second cable (e.g. HDMI for presentation, ethernet for Internet access) that's literally still a battery-powered device we're talking about.