Apple wasn’t a big fan of ports and minimized them, taking advantage of the attractiveness of its MacBooks and the appearance of the USB-C connector. The MacBook Air even had a single such port; this was something many criticized for the need to go #donglelife. It was later used, fortunately, on some laptops and desktops in its catalogue.

Others followed, following a trend that went completely against the norm for laptop manufacturers in the early 2000s: Many ports had to be included to avoid user inconvenience, and here were the actual ports. link monsters.

This is a case of ‘backward war’ that emerged around 2006. Even the person who posted the images on Twitter — I still have trouble using thing X — doesn’t make it clear: This was made by the PC Philanthropy account. A small but spectacular video where the laptop can be seen spinning with connectors and extra items everywhere.

In the same thread, the user shared a few more images of equipment assembled by the company Falcon Northwest, but we were unable to identify the specific model. In its configuration, Presence of AMD Ahtlon 64 FX-60 processor with 2 GB RAMand an NVIDIA 7900 GTX graphics card released in March 2006, theoretically designed for desktops and not laptops.

This touchpad… Source: PC Philanthropy

But of course this laptop was not a normal laptop. It was a dedicated device aimed at gamers and sought to replace the most powerful computers of the time, not only in terms of power but also in terms of connectivity.

In this visual tour we can see how the equipment has DVI, serial and parallel port. triple! PS/2, dual Ethernet ports, composite video, four USB-A portstwo FireWire 1394 ports, several audio outputs, MicroDrive slot, Smart Media, Compact Flash, PCMCIA, infrared, playback controls on the front, and two DVD rewriters.

Also notable is the small size of the touchpad, which seems to have been included almost tokenly, as there is room for a much larger touchpad. It was clear that its creators were betting on users who would use the mouse as well as this equipment.

Sony’s Sony VAIO SX12 came out in 2019 and showed us that it’s entirely possible to have a good set of ports.

The laptop was certainly a connectivity marvel for its time – much more refined versions of this concept would appear later, such as the Sony VAIO SX12 – but it had a problem: these components aimed at desktops made it so. battery life was very limited. Using it without being connected to power was almost useless, especially if used for gaming.

There was also the issue of overheating: cooling systems were not as advanced as they are today, but also both the CPU and GPU had to deal with a fairly small footprint, despite the thickness of the equipment.

So, despite the gorgeous display of its ports, this laptop ended up being useless for most scenarios. Of course: If you wanted a (heavy) alternative that you could take with you everywhere, the option was there.

Image | PC Philanthropy (Extended with Adobe Firefly)

in Xataka | We were complaining about #donglelife and it wasn’t that big of a deal