Not with the latest version, Ethernet was gone several revisions ago. Most people really don't need it. I generally only use it at work, and leave the dongle connected to the Ethernet cable, so it's no harder to plug in than connecting the cable itself.
Agreed, I personally find the lack annoying, but it's easy to expense the dongles and leave one on the RJ45. Or to keep the one I expensed at my previous job
you must re-dongle the USB port (and you'd better hope you have some kind of mega-wire-spider so you can feed it power at the same time... and connect your USB stuff... and connect an external HDMI monitor...)
No different than Thunderbolt.
The idea is that you'll just have one cable coming from your monitor, providing power and a USB hub. Currently you can only get that with Thunderbolt from an Apple display, but a number of display manufacturers have signed up to do the same with USB-C. I'd love to be able to have a single cable to connect power, ethernet, display, keyboard and mouse to my laptop.
Agreed, the ability to act as a docking station is really the only remaining appeal of the increasingly-aged Apple TD, which at $900+ still only supplies USB 2.0. Mind you since most of us can't toss existing monitors and repurchase at will, I wouldn't be able to take advantage of USB-C docking in the foreseeable future anyway. It does get annoying at the office to have to plug in 1) power 2) ethernet, since the wireless is flaky 3) DP for monitor and 4) USB for phone charging. But if that were even close to the most annoying part of my work day, compared to eg. dealing with a dumbass who ridicules me for suggesting that wheat contains gluten, I could live with that.
Intel CPUs are not defective, they just act that way. -- Henry Spencer
