And look how much thinner. A large part of that is the need for physical ports which although they may loom small on the outside, also take up space inside for the boards that convert signals. Now those conversions happen in the dongles if needed.

The real problem is that USB didn't implement a hub standard so most hubs have had to use old hub standards and just have a single USB-C connector and the rest USB-A, hdmi, etc. There haven't been many purely USB-C to USB-C hubs to allow for connecting lots of USB-C devices to a single port and usually they end up losing features or splitting bandwidth instead of sharing the full bandwidth.

I am happy that things have converged over time to a single, truly versatile multi-bus capable port (USB-C/Thunderbolt 3) ... however, the vendors IMHO should be legally bound to supply down-converters for all the peripherals that used the older buses for the next 10 years, transitively for 2 generations of buses.

If USB-C supports bus 'X', then there should be inexpensive and easy to purchase down-converters from USB-C to 'X'. If Bus 'X' replaced bus 'Y' in the last 10 years then there should be a down-converter available from bus 'X' to 'Y'.

One problematic example is Firewire.. Apple used to make Thunderbolt-2-to-Firewire800 dongles, but they stopped and now they're rare as hens' teeth and ungodly-expensive.

They still sell Thunderbolt-3-to-2 dongles, but how long will they keep selling those?

Oh, and while I'm wishing for ponies, the drivers/specifications for all such adapters should be open-source and royalty-free.

I'm not very tech savy but for years I wondered if I could somehow cram a desktop computer in an aluminium suit case. The challenge is getting to the point I will just take it.

Back in the ‘90’s, they had every port you could imagine, and some STILL felt the need to use a docking station. You really can’t please everyone. I actually like the streamlined setup more these days. Because I’d rather have ports I actually use and that are fairly standardised, as opposed to a bunch of others that are of no use.

I never used most of the ports on my 90’s laptops. Never used a parallel port, PS2, never used the PCMCIA card slot, etc.

All I really need is a full sized HDMI, a few USB-C’s and one or two A’s for convenience.

Do the bottom two have the same charging port? Impossible!

Also, my first time seeing the newer FireWire and whatever the video output is...