If you don’t have a dongle, the dongle is basically just hidden inside (a chip on the main board or an extension card). Being able to add dongles is a very easy way to quickly add things like wifi. Otherwise you’d have to open the PC and mount a card and the number of slots inside is also limited. So yeah, builtin is good, but also no, dongles can be better. It’s just a different option.
I guess you could use the same argument to say you’re buying less when you buy your laptop. It’s just arbitrary data I/O through USB with the software level interpreting it. They don’t have to ship a DAC or wifi radio (if they actually omitted that) or… whatever you call the component that’s part of a GPU that converts to HDMI - instead they offload that to the dongle or peripheral. In effect your device is just slowly being whittled down to a processor to USB bridge.
The headphone and USB ones are the ones I hate the most. My “flagship” phone doesn’t work with any of my ~15 pairs of headphones (mostly earbuds but a few actually nice ones) without an adapter. Booting up a laptop into a nix OS that doesn’t have wpa_supplicant etc. installed, no ethernet dongle or ethernet port, that’s about to be annoying.
This is more about laptops/phones than desktops btw. Normal sized desktops usually still ship with every port, plus one or two USB-C’s these days.
I think the point was universal dongle with universal BLE / radio protocol. It could still have different encryption schemes and keys for each device / manufacturer by upgrading / installing drivers (so in software), but at least the radio packet protocol would be the same which would keep the hardware universal. Kind of like how smart home hubs (WiFi +/ Zigbee +/ Bluetooth +/ 433MHz / etc) work.
But we all know how creating a new “universal” protocol goes from experience (ie USB “standards”).
I guess you could use the same argument to say you’re buying less when you buy your laptop. It’s just arbitrary data I/O through USB with the software level interpreting it. They don’t have to ship a DAC or wifi radio (if they actually omitted that) or… whatever you call the component that’s part of a GPU that converts to HDMI - instead they offload that to the dongle or peripheral. In effect your device is just slowly being whittled down to a processor to USB bridge.
The headphone and USB ones are the ones I hate the most. My “flagship” phone doesn’t work with any of my ~15 pairs of headphones (mostly earbuds but a few actually nice ones) without an adapter. Booting up a laptop into a nix OS that doesn’t have wpa_supplicant etc. installed, no ethernet dongle or ethernet port, that’s about to be annoying.
This is more about laptops/phones than desktops btw. Normal sized desktops usually still ship with every port, plus one or two USB-C’s these days.
If you french fry when you pizza you’re gonna have a bad time.
Seriously though, if you want to use wifi without some sort of supplicant you’ve fucked up.
You can put it on, but at that point you’re with reinstalling the system or moving packages over on a thumb drive. Huge pain.
I think the point was universal dongle with universal BLE / radio protocol. It could still have different encryption schemes and keys for each device / manufacturer by upgrading / installing drivers (so in software), but at least the radio packet protocol would be the same which would keep the hardware universal. Kind of like how smart home hubs (WiFi +/ Zigbee +/ Bluetooth +/ 433MHz / etc) work.
But we all know how creating a new “universal” protocol goes from experience (ie USB “standards”).