"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.

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

I don't wanna wait until the system catches up I need to hook up my laptop to the projector now, and all the cables are hdmi

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.

By the time the ecosystem has "caught up", we'll have USB-D ports to contend with. Possibly even USB-E.

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.

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.

But thats the dongles mac address. They break. They get passed around and used in multiple devices. If i am trying to authenticate a third party laptop and they are moving from dock to dock then i cant use the unique hardware ID to identify that hardware. I can only see where to dongle is.

In theory its all well and good saying the dongle will stay with the laptop or the mac isn't a useful tool for authentication. But in practice in the wonderful wild world of IT. Its never that straightforward.

Its crap for asset registers, its crap for authentication servers and its crap for finding devices on switches with mac address tables.

I know there are other ways, but network ports aside, why am i buying a £60-£100 docking station to get all those ports back? I had them in my laptop. Now i have to spend more money to get them back and rely on a bit of cheap hardware that needs drivers, updates, and has breakable wires and ports to provide the functionality that was built in to my older devices.

There are advantages, but they dont outweigh the disadvantages. They just make it cheaper to manufacture laptops.