That's probably the missing cherry on top, as having vpro once the framework motherboard gets reused as a home server it gives some manageability features.

The main application of 20 Gb/s USB ports is to connect external NVMe SSDs, when faster USB 4 or Thunderbolt ports and SSDs are not available.

For an external NVMe SSD on USB, a 20 Gb/s USB port will double the throughput, unlike for a 10 Gb/s Ethernet interface where any improvements are completely negligible.

I do not think that 20 Gb/s USB Type C ports are "very rarely supported". Every mini-PC or desktop motherboard that I have bought during the last 10 years had at least one such USB port.

Such ports appear to be rare only on laptops, because most laptops have very few USB ports.

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.

Anyway it is probably just there to demonstrate the possibilities to consumers. What if a lower profile standard for networking gets popularized?

If it had a hinged or expanding[0] ethernet port so it could sit flush with the chassis when not in use it would make a lot more sense.

[0] It's easier to show what I mean https://www.reddit.com/r/TechnologyPorn/comments/hvlxep/orig...

You can likewise put 26" rims on a Ford Fiesta but it will look and function equally poorly.

It is mechanically disagreeable.

The weight/shape of the module will break the USB-C port in short order because it is solely supported by the connector.

For instance, by bumping the spatula hanging off your Mac.

For that matter, USB-C are crap connectors, I don't care how many graphs and BS data you show me stating they're the most reliable connector ever. I do not believe it.

They're the only types of connectors I've seen damaged repeatedly, and the only one with which I've personally experienced damage, and I've been using laptops since before many of you were born.

These realtek 10gbe chips are more in the range of the Pi Zero class machines (0.5W idle, 2W loaded) which don't often come with heatsinks though they might benefit from them. If it has a good thermal connection to a good thick ground plane on the PCB, that's worth almost as much as a passive heatsink on the top of the chip.

usb-c < card edge < motherboard integrated in terms of how much heat can be transfered through the connection. Where the motherboard would have the largest ground plane to soak up heat from such an IC and dissipate it passively. The usb-c module is worst case by being a small enclosed box with very little thermal connection through the plastic insulating housing. An aluminum enclosure might dissipate enough heat passively to make it pleasant to use.

A wider bag doesn't solve it. The part that sticks out could still easily snag on something. I wouldn't want to take that risk, and I doubt many people would.

I feel like you're arguing just to argue...

Even with a heatsink and fan, I had to upgrade to a higher quality set to keep Jellyfin from thermal throttling a Pi5 while transcoding 4K video.

The economics/upgrade math just does not make sense.

No, you wouldn't. You'd have one of these instead: https://frame.work/products/usb-c-expansion-card?v=FRACCQ000... (or the one matching a color you prefer and your particular model)

Sure. But this does not make them proprietary, they work fine with non-Framework laptops as well.

Can you slide them into a just-sized mechanical receptacle on a MacBook? On a Dell, HP, etc.

No.

Unless you're crazy and leave the expansion ports unpopulated.

My best guess for Apple's actions is that despite there being a very real demand for a smaller phone, they don't think the discomfort is bad enough for people to switch to Android, so they don't even try. A small phone makes a lot of profit, but ignoring the demand also makes a lot of profit.

The Air was a real flop.

While this may be theoretically (almost) possible, I’m quite sure this is absolutely not the case in practice.

For example see these benchmarks of one of the more recent USB to Ethernet chipsets [1], that can reach ~9.5 Gb/s on USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 but only between ~6.2 to ~7.3 on 3.2 Gen 2x1 laptops.

1. https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2026/new-10-gbe-usb-adapte...

Edit: Haha, didn’t realise TFA was by the same author as these benchmarks but he’s done a lot of testing and benchmarking of these kind of devices over a long time, and it agrees with all the other benchmarking from other people I’ve seen too!

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

Are you talking about USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 though? Because I've never seen any MiniPC with this port and as for motherboards, I checked my local retailer and only ~15% of currently sold ones have Gen 2x2 (mostly high-end ones).

Try to load any modern website on dial-up. The connection will likely timeout before a full page load.

Subsequently, in 1967, Black of Motorola experimentally derived a median time to failure (MTTF, i.e., operational lifetime) model for EM in Al interconnects, showing that the time to failure due to EM is inversely proportional to both the current density and the absolute temperature of the interconnect.

[1]: https://infinitalab.com/blog/ic-failure-analysis-defect-type...

[2]: https://resources.system-analysis.cadence.com/blog/msa2020-b...

[3]: https://www.mdpi.com/2079-9292/14/15/3151#sec3-electronics-1...

With mini-PCs, I frequently use external SSDs, so I certainly used those ports at their full speed.

The only mini-PCs that I had in recent years without such a fast USB port were Arm-CPU based, as those are typically starved in fast peripheral interfaces in comparison with the Intel/AMD CPUs.

So the their maximum speed is approximately 9.7 Gb/s.

Then for Ethernet there is a protocol-dependent overhead, e.c. depending on whether TCP or UDP is used, and depending on whether standard packets or jumbo packets are used.

The TCP overhead can reach in the worst case up to close to another 3%, reducing the achievable TCP throughput to around 9.4 Gb/s.

The USB frames add some extra overhead, but it is normally not important in comparison with other factors that can reduce the throughput.

All that a 20 Gb/s USB port can do is to reduce the overhead of the USB frames, but that is a negligible improvement. Using jumbo Ethernet frames (which are 6 times bigger than standard frames), if both ends support them, is likely more useful for increasing the throughput, than using a 20 Gb/s USB port.

I am of the opinion that 5Gbe is a much more sensible speed for a laptop adapter right now as it uses half the power and can obviously run full wack on 10Gb/s USB so you're looking at like 5Gbe vs ~9.4Gbe.

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. :-/

At distances where Cat.6A is even an option the demands on the fiber are very low. And it uses less power than the BASE-T PHY. The cable at least without integrated power is very thin as well, unless you can't respect it enough to not kink it, in which case you'd want a thicker one just to prevent you from being able to break the fiber.

And you get much better future proofing with SMF. And if you do need a long fast run, SMF is what you want.