Item — HN Reader

Because everyone uses WIFI.

Do you have an ethernet port in every room of your house? And you actually plug in your laptop every time you sit down in each room of your house?

Do you plug into ethernet at the coffee shop? Airport? Friend's house? Library? Doctor's office?

No, neither do I. That's why it doesn't have an ethernet port, just like your smartphone doesn't have one.

1 comments

When given the chance, I plug in an Ethernet port (I always carry an end-to-end Ethernet cable with my laptop). This is because it is faster, safer and a lot more stable than Internet over the air.

If you're on a decently setup wifi network, this isn't true for practical purposes. The connection from your house to your ISP is going to be effectively your bottleneck 99% of the time.

Nevertheless I still prefer a cabled connection. Wifi is a whole new attack vector because you have data packets floating through air. They might be encrypted, but that doesn't mean they can't be decrypted by untrusted parties.