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The netbook of 6 years ago had an ethernet port and ran Linux out of the box. Feature parity has not been achieved by later models, if this is reimagining thing

The netbook of 6 years ago had an ethernet port and ran Linux out of the box. Feature parity has not been achieved by later models, if this is reimagining things they're imagining with a case of Alzheimer's.

sliverstorm 13y ago
Gee, I wonder why a notebook that's like an eight of an inch thick doesn't have an ethernet port. Well, it's probably because they are too stupid to remember 6 years ago... I mean, what else could it be?
- jrockway 13y ago
  Because an Ethernet PHY is actually somewhat expensive and Apple already successfully tested the waters. Consider the following tuples: (Apple, loved by all) (Apple, no Ethernet port) (Microsoft, not loved by many) (Microsoft, Ethernet port). Correlation is causation, right?
- harshreality 13y ago
  Many (more than 6) years ago there was a pcmcia card (3com perhaps?) that had an ethernet jack that popped out of the card, rather than requiring a dongle. Think of it like a cross section of the important parts of a normal ethernet port, with push-to-latch, push-to-unlatch-and-deploy behavior. Rather than requiring movable parts, it could be built into the keyboard with some sort of protective cover on both top and bottom (if there's enough clearance on the bottom for the end of the ethernet connector). It's possible. It might be too costly to get acceptable reliability, but it's possible and it's been done.
kyriakos 13y ago
6 years later I hardly ever plug in my laptop - its wifi all the way. No ARM based tablets that I know of have an ethernet port, and I don't see anyone complaining about it.
- ingenium 13y ago
  Really? I plug mine into ethernet whenever I can. Even on 5Ghz the unpredictable latency can really impact things, particularly NFS. For example, rsnapshot backups that take 10 minutes on ethernet take upwards of 5 or 6 hours on wifi. It's not a bandwidth issue, it's appears to be latency with lots of small files. Note: I'm using an 802.11ac router and a laptop with a Centrino 6300 chipset. I have the 5Ghz spectrum all to myself. For bulk transfers I get consistent speeds of close to 100Mbit.
- josteink 13y ago
  6 years later I hardly ever plug in my laptop - its wifi all the way. For daily stuff, sure. When I need to shift gigs and gigs of media or VMs or whatever though: Cabled is the only way. It's the only thing which is reliable enough to not make me tear my hair out and for stuff like this performance really matters. Especially when it's orders of magnitude faster. To some people, not having a physical ethernet port seriously is a deal-killer. Yes. Apple has successfully shipped models without it, but Apple's biggest market-segment isn't IT professionals. It's non-technical people fed up with Windows and hipster bloggers.
  - AlisdairO 13y ago
    Technical people may not be their biggest market, but they do have a sizable percentage of the technical-person demographic. I use an old macbook (that has an ethernet port). When it comes time to replace it I'll buy a dongle with the new one, and on the relatively rare cases I actually need it use that. I can't really imagine it ever being a significant issue to me.

sliverstorm 13y ago

Gee, I wonder why a notebook that's like an eight of an inch thick doesn't have an ethernet port. Well, it's probably because they are too stupid to remember 6 years ago... I mean, what else could it be?

jrockway 13y ago
Because an Ethernet PHY is actually somewhat expensive and Apple already successfully tested the waters. Consider the following tuples: (Apple, loved by all) (Apple, no Ethernet port) (Microsoft, not loved by many) (Microsoft, Ethernet port). Correlation is causation, right?
harshreality 13y ago
Many (more than 6) years ago there was a pcmcia card (3com perhaps?) that had an ethernet jack that popped out of the card, rather than requiring a dongle. Think of it like a cross section of the important parts of a normal ethernet port, with push-to-latch, push-to-unlatch-and-deploy behavior. Rather than requiring movable parts, it could be built into the keyboard with some sort of protective cover on both top and bottom (if there's enough clearance on the bottom for the end of the ethernet connector). It's possible. It might be too costly to get acceptable reliability, but it's possible and it's been done.

kyriakos 13y ago

6 years later I hardly ever plug in my laptop - its wifi all the way. No ARM based tablets that I know of have an ethernet port, and I don't see anyone complaining about it.

ingenium 13y ago
Really? I plug mine into ethernet whenever I can. Even on 5Ghz the unpredictable latency can really impact things, particularly NFS. For example, rsnapshot backups that take 10 minutes on ethernet take upwards of 5 or 6 hours on wifi. It's not a bandwidth issue, it's appears to be latency with lots of small files. Note: I'm using an 802.11ac router and a laptop with a Centrino 6300 chipset. I have the 5Ghz spectrum all to myself. For bulk transfers I get consistent speeds of close to 100Mbit.
josteink 13y ago
6 years later I hardly ever plug in my laptop - its wifi all the way. For daily stuff, sure. When I need to shift gigs and gigs of media or VMs or whatever though: Cabled is the only way. It's the only thing which is reliable enough to not make me tear my hair out and for stuff like this performance really matters. Especially when it's orders of magnitude faster. To some people, not having a physical ethernet port seriously is a deal-killer. Yes. Apple has successfully shipped models without it, but Apple's biggest market-segment isn't IT professionals. It's non-technical people fed up with Windows and hipster bloggers.
- AlisdairO 13y ago
  Technical people may not be their biggest market, but they do have a sizable percentage of the technical-person demographic. I use an old macbook (that has an ethernet port). When it comes time to replace it I'll buy a dongle with the new one, and on the relatively rare cases I actually need it use that. I can't really imagine it ever being a significant issue to me.