"Extremely thin" is pretty low on my list of features I want.
If making it a bit thicker gives me ethernet and HDMI then make it thicker. A laptop moves from place to place, and not needing dongles / specialist cables makes it far easier to jump on anybodies desk and just plug in.
Exactly. And most laptops are thick enough if they remove the stupid curve that makes them look thinner than they are. I've even seen laptops with a flip down RJ-45 port so it can maintain the profile.
Look at that top picture again. It's not thinner. Look how much of a taper it has to make you think its thinner.
Looking at the bottom one, the back of the screen has gotten thinner compared to the others, but the bottom has barely changed. They lie to you, port thickness has zero bearing on how thin the laptops are, its all lies
Thankfully USB-C can handle both of those protocols. Just like with Micro USB and Mini before it, it will just take time until the ecosystem catches up. Just, this time, you can run the entirety of possible data streams through a single port.
In many settings you get a hdmi cable where the other end is installed out of view, so that's not an option. But HDMI is a bad standard anyways, so I'm fine with having to carry an adapter
I know it can because I've got that exact setup on my work laptop but in order to actually be able to make use of it I need a dongle to use as a breakout and actually give me an HDMI port. As I only have an HDMI to HDMI cable. If it came with a USBC to HDMI cable then that would be acceptable, but they don't ever come with them.
I just wish they would give us more than two ports, one of them is the power port anyway so technically they're only giving you one port, which I think is about three ports too few.
It cannot do both at the same time. That is demonstrably untrue. It's either a power port or it's a data port and if it's been a power port then it is by definition not a data port.
I'm not sure why you think that's untrue, but it is true. I literally have a dock that provides power to my laptop, as well as connecting it to my monitors, keyboard, mouse, etc. all over one USB type C cable.
But only twice. You know the problem with having a network port on a usb is that the laptop no longer has a unique mac address, which can cause problems with authentication in a corporate environment. So when building devices or using mac auth it can be a nightmare.
MAC is useless as a component of the security check. It's trivial to change; either with a dongle, as you said, or in the network configuration of every major and minor OS.
But if i am authenticating a unique third party laptop i could use the mac address and apply a profile in clearpass to authenticate it and apply an ACL to lock the device down as a separate measure to creating a separate vlan for the device.
I wouldn't have called it useless in that regard. But im fairly new to network administration, so perhaps i am not well versed enough to know better.
Our clearpass servers struggle sometimes, and i experience timeouts or rejections when a laptop moves from one usb c docking station to another if they fail dot1x and revert to mab.
Also all of this aside, the fact that all the ports got removed from a laptop and now you have to plig in a £60-100 dock to get all those ports back is an absolute con.