Comment by ChuckMcM
14 hours ago
I chuckled at 10G wired ethernet on a laptop. I mean in a docking station? Sure that seems reasonable. But fun none the less.
I appreciate the USB-C nature of the Framework's expansion ports, it does make real the entire reason that USB was created in the first place, hot plug slots. Still, I (and others) pointed out to Intel early on that using Ethernet with a specific packet type would be cheaper and just as fast (which the ATA over Ethernet folks proved), but then you wouldn't get the 'certification tax' that the USB consortium extracts. :-).
Cynicism aside, the design issues suggest that it might make sense in future laptops to have heat spreaders around the plug in port, although that makes things thicker and people obsess over thinness.
> I chuckled at 10G wired ethernet on a laptop. I mean in a docking station? Sure that seems reasonable. But fun none the less.
What difference does a docking station make? Sometimes you want to spend a minute or two setting up your laptop in a more serious way, and that's just as reasonable with or without a docking station.
The "dock" comment made sense to me because I don't think that true "road warrior" laptop use and 10G Ethernet deployments would coincide all that often.
I've put a disproportionate number of hours and $$$ into my homelab over the years, and I still only have 2.5G Ethernet switches deployed. Most offices' (much less home/coworking space/etc.) network traffic is passing through single-gigabit switches.
This is where my head is on docks. When your connected to enhanced infrastructure (like your home lab) sure, but when you're checked into the Embassy Suites? Not particularly useful :-).
That said, I'm kind of sad that Framework and others have generally opted to let "third party USB-C docks" be the docking solution. I miss the days when my Thinkpad dropped onto its docking station with a purpose build bottom connector and seamlessly became a desktop/deskside type computer that was wired into my desk setup. Sadly I think that vision of docking died with the Thinkpad's sale to Lenovo.
I have a 5gbps symmetrical fiber connection at home, so I've spent a fair amount of time and money upgrading my homelab backbone to 10gbps. That includes a 10GBe connection to my desk, but I've had issues getting the connection to be reliable (terminating the shielded Cat6A I have in the walls is a pain). That drop hasn't been working for the past few months, so I've been on wifi instead; it hasn't been enough of an issue for me to invest the time in fixing it.
Reminds me of routers on the internet.
>I chuckled at 10G wired ethernet on a laptop.
Back in the early days of wireless networking I had my laptop configured with the wireless and wired networks bonded. I want to say that was 2Mbps on the wireless, so if I was doing a big transfer I could walk over to a wired port in my house and plug in to get 100Mbps.
The problem with docking stations is they're more expensive than an ethernet adapter. I tried to use a few 2.5+Gbps dongles with my laptop(s) to avoid spending $400 on another Caldigit dock (TS4; I already have a TS3 with 1Gbps ethernet).
Unfortunately, all 3 USB-C dongles I tried had significantly worse performance than the built-in 1 gig ethernet on the dock, apparently using the RTL8156 chipset which is known to be unstable.
I've got a 4th dongle on the way to try next! If I buy enough of these things I'll have spent more than just buying the right dock in the first place.
Others comments already mentioned multimedia, but for example where I work we have some development board and prototypes with 10g ethernet, but most developers have a laptop rather than a fixed station. Turns out smallish (but overly expensive) thunderbolt 10g adapters can be used for testing and even reach full thoughput in many cases.
Ethernet comes with a completely different set of social norms, like not having a master and slave device.
If you work with media having a 10G connection on a laptop isn't all that absurd. In fact slow network speeds are the main reason why people have to use things like Thunderbolt instead of using a NAS (e.g. offloading data on a film set).
My laptop is basically a desktop in a clamshell so I don't need a docking station (and it's like 5 lbs with crazy cooling so I can use it as, you know, a laptop). I work with large binaries (media) on a daily basis. I have a 1G ethernet port built in, but I'd love a 10G port. I'd absolutely make use of it (maybe not all 10Gs of it, but most of them). Besides, things are only going to get faster...
I have a Thunderbolt 10Gbe adapter. It's a larger form factor than a Framework expansion card and it has a metal case, so it dissipates heat well. Copper 10Gbe chipsets generate a lot of heat.
I wish they would just have direct PCIe lanes. For most of the cards doing those speeds USB is just unnecessary overhead
They sort of do in the 16 with the dual M.2 adapter:
https://frame.work/pl/en/products/dual-m-2-adapter
People have been making custom OCuLink adapters and recently Framework developed its own:
https://frame.work/pl/en/products/framework-oculink-dev-kit
Future proofing. Websites nowadays load tens of megabytes for a simple news page. I wouldn’t be surprised if in the future a website consumes 500+ megabytes on the initial page load. That will take 40 seconds on a 100 megabit link and 400 milliseconds on a 10 gigabit link.
Try to load any modern website on dial-up. The connection will likely timeout before a full page load.
This is the most dystopic use for that bandwidth I could possibly imagine.
Step 1 of displaying a web page is to download a small LLM from the server to create a rendering framework at run-time...
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Fr. There was that small window back in the early ‘10s where data was slow and expensive in India and 4g wasn’t yet pervasive in China. Execs were still receptive to my pitches that we needed to spend some engineering cycles on rework to improve initial load times / weight after showing them simulations of absurdly slow first paint / first content over simulated 2g/3g from India / China data centers.
Once 5g became pervasive and data cheap, no one gaf about a cold load weight fitting on a floppy.
I’m still clutching my iphone mini, which after ios 26 just boggs down under the absurd weight of many pages and turns in to a space heater before reloading entire page b/c of error. No need for forced obsolescence when the enshittification of basic websites takes care of that for you. :-/