In article , Roger Blake
wrote:

that's quite short and will render a laptop immobile. it's barely long
enough to go behind a desk.

I have seen many instances where laptops are installed in situations
where there is limited desk space, and a wired connection is used.

if there's limited desk space, then wireless would be a better choice
so as to not be confined to the desk.

that's also not a common situation.

(Such
machines are rarely if ever used on battery either, so battery life
is not considered when purchasing.)

then why buy a laptop at all?

use a wall mount or an arm attached to the side of the desk and there
is no impact to the limited desk space.

Portability is only one reason to
choose a laptop, not the only one.

it's by far the main reason for most people.

otherwise, a desktop would likely be a better choice since for the same
money, it usually has better performance, larger displays and/or other
features (slots, drive bays, etc.)

meanwhile, most laptop users don't want to pay for a port they won't be
using much, if ever, which is why many laptop makers are no longer
including it.

not all makers do that (yet), so if someone does want wired ethernet on
a laptop, they can choose one that has it, or just use an adapter.

the reality is that wireless is as fast or faster than wired (assuming
gigabit), comparable in reliability and unlike wired, encrypted.

That has not been my experience

it has for me. gigabit is a bottleneck, but 10gb-e is not cheap enough
yet to justify the advantages. it's getting there though.

and if you are on an open connection
it is not encrypted.

open connections would be at public hotspots, where one would not
expect much privacy, and in that situation, use a vpn. problem solved.

a home or office network is almost always encrypted, and if not, it
absolutely should be for all sorts of reasons.

(At least not until WPA3 is widely adopted.) Also
WPA2 is fairly easy to crack at this point.

it's not as easy as you might think, and really only an issue if you
specifically are being targeted, in which case you have far bigger
problems than worrying about wifi.

the usual scenario is someone wants to mooch wifi, so they'll jump on
whatever is easiest to crack. your wifi network only needs to be harder
to crack than the rest and since there are still a lot of networks with
wep (or no password), wpa2 can be considered fairly safe.

nothing is perfect.

To "hack" a wired connection
you need to be physically present to jack into the network.

only long enough to drop a tap, which is just seconds. after that,
physical presence is not required, except to retrieve the tap, unless
it can be accessed remotely (some can).

or even better, gain access via a phishing attack. then it doesn't
matter how someone connects, or if they do at all, and the amount of
data one can get is a *lot* greater...

I typically see connection speed of 300-700 megabits on wireless-AC.
Pretty good but still not as fast as a wired gigabit connection.

that's due to your choice of equipment, not the technology itself.

i typically see 800-850mb/s, which is a little slower than wired but
not enough to deal with cables, at least for laptops.

it also only matters if the network is saturated, which is not that
common. how often do you use more 700mb/s for an extended period of
time?

again, the limit is actually the gigabit uplink:
https://www.smallnetbuilder.com/imag...sus_rtac86u/as
us_rtac86u_5ghz_peak_dn.jpg

Doesn't make much difference for most internet use.

correct, which is what most people do.

It does make a
difference when transferring large files between your PC and a local
server or if your use case requires the least possible latency.

it might if the wifi link isn't optimal, but that's not a common
scenario anyway, however, if it's big enough to make a difference, use
an adapter for the transfer and then switch back.

it's not a justification to have an ethernet port when most of the
time, it won't be used.

on the other hand, if both client and server have 10gb-e, then file
transfer over wired would be faster, but that's not (yet) common. it
will happen fairly soon, but that day is not now.