Loss of the ethernet port is a real pain. The cat5 dimensions are awkward for a thin laptop so you can accept it for a machine that does basically nothing local

Loss of the ethernet port is a real pain. The cat5 dimensions are awkward for a thin laptop so you can accept it for a machine that does basically nothing locally. But as soon as you have a hundred GB of stuff on your laptop you need to transfer you wish you still had wired ethernet. In fact, 10G. And then you buy a Thunderbolt to 10G dongle. It is brilliant that the new Mac Mini has 10G on-board. Back in the day serial and parallel were very useful for interfacing to real world machines. Now everyone uses a simple linux board like an rpi, but in the interim it was seriously inconvenient to interface. USB1 is absolute rubbish, USB2 not much better.