The thing is, that the dongles are integrated into the laptop body. For a portable machine, this is huge. I love my 16" MB pro and do think that 4x USB-C is gre

The thing is, that the dongles are integrated into the laptop body. For a portable machine, this is huge. I love my 16" MB pro and do think that 4x USB-C is great for connectivity, but having to carry up to 4 dongles with me any time I move between working at home and the office is pretty much a nightmare. The built-in dongle ports, if you might call them that, are a much more elegant solution - somthing Apple should have invented (and could have sold for a lot of money). On top of that, they seem to provide even more "dongles" than laptop ports out of the box. It is also probably mechanically much more robust, if you plug cables into your dongle box instead of into the (motherboard mounted) port directly. If one of the dongle boxes breaks, it should be cheap to exchange.