Thunderbolt 3 ports can provide 15w of power. If you fill them up with devices, especially ones that draw power, then your docking station very quickly needs its own power source in order to make them all work. I’ve already had a docking station refuse to extend my laptop to multiple screens because it needed its own plug.

Anywayz im not arguing that they dont have advantages. Im arfuing that they aren’t necessarily better than having individual ports dedicated to specific functions.

Ok. Cool, but like i said, your use case and the person you responded to are obviously different.

That doesnt have to be “because boomer” or be someone is objectively right or wrong. Because thats not the issue.

You are just trying to be right about something that is completely subjective.

I argued that taking the ports away and replacing them with usb ports is not as cut and dry as sayi g that is better. It depends on your own personal needs.

I accept that a port that can be anything you want is great and may have some advantages over a dedicated port that has only one function. But there are downsides.

You need to carry around a bunch of adapters to get what you need. You are limited to those 4 ports. Remember that most laptops had multiple usb ports alongside multiple display and audio ports so you have lost more than ypu have gained.

You also are still limited to 4 devices or you need a docking station which adds more bulk. And that docking station has limited power unless you connect an external power source.

I feel like you are looking at your needs and severely oversimplifying this debate. Which isnt helpful and doesnt make you right by default.

That’s the issue then. You think it’s boomers who dont like change as opposed to capitalists removing functionality to sell it back to you in a separate package. I would aregue its zoomers not being able to identify when they are being conned.

I’ve already been through the problem with that. Cba doing it again.

Wait!.. You don’t have problems with something you only used twice in a year? No way!

Its clear you and the person you replied to have different use cases for your devices, and perhaps what they are saying is just as valid as what you are saying.

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.

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 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.