I got myself a Mac for learning SwiftUi because I want to make an iPhone game. I got myself a used 16/256 M1 Air model that has 2 USB-C ports and that’s it.
This made me create a workstation, where I have a high quality Thunderbolt 3 dock that works with DisplayLink, so I can have up to 4 external displays on windows and 3 on my MacBook Air. On this dock, I have connected 2 monitors, a mouse, a keyboard, a webcam, still have some USB A and C ports free to use. Best thing is that this dock has a micro SD and a regular SD slot!
All this through a single USB-C cable!
I want to connect my work HP Probook to this setup? Just plug the USB-C cable in and all comes to life!
I want to connect my gaming-PC? Just plug the USB-C cable in the Thunderbolt slot of the Graphics card and all comes to life!
Oh, I want to connect my USB-C emulator console, iPad, Tablet, etc. to the monitor, or the USB-stick? Or the Ethernet ? Just plug it in!
Basically I got my single cable workstation, and all that because of Apple removing useful at-home-things from a on-the-go device
I have a laptop with both USB C and USB a and HDMI. The SD card slot is only full SD, unfortunately, but I did add a terabyte M.2 slot to the inside because it only came with 512GB, so it’s not like I’m lacking any space.
These ports are very useful when I don’t carry my dock with me. Also very useful for connecting multiple screens, as USB-C doesn’t have that much bandwidth.
Though, from what I can tell the MacBook M1 models don’t have the hardware capabilities to run multiple screens without falling back to hacks like DisplayLink that will eat up your CPU like crazy, so I suppose the screen issue probably won’t affect you too much; Apple had some weird design restrictions in their earlier M series chips that means you can’t get multiple DisplayPort streams out.
Docks are neat, and there’s a reason they’ve been in use by businesses since the 90s, but you can have docks and ports on the laptop itself.