Apple kills Ethernet, Fujitsu engineers a fold-out LAN jack mic-drop
Description
Dark-blue meme panel with white text reads: "Apple: our device is too thin to fit a LAN port. Let’s just get rid of it. Fujitsu: LOL, hold my sake, baka-gaijin." Below, four close-up photos of a red-and-black Fujitsu laptop show a spring-loaded, hinged RJ-45 port. Photo 1: the port is flush and closed, nearly invisible on the thin chassis. Photo 2: a small tray flips out, exposing the gold contacts and extending beyond the edge. Photo 3: the tray folds down, forming a full-sized Ethernet jack. Photo 4: a translucent Ethernet cable is partially inserted into the now-functional port. The meme contrasts Apple’s decision to drop wired networking in ultrathin hardware with Fujitsu’s mechanical workaround, highlighting hardware trade-offs, vendor design philosophy, and developer frustration with dongles
Comments
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Fujitsu implemented lazy-loading at Layer 1 with a spring-loaded RJ-45; Apple just threw a DongleRequiredException and called it “courage.”
This is the same engineering philosophy that separates teams who solve problems from teams who sell dongles as a service model
Apple removed the port and called it courage; Fujitsu added a folding mechanism and called it Tuesday. One company ships constraints, the other ships hinges
While Apple's design philosophy treats physical ports like technical debt to be eliminated, Fujitsu engineers apparently attended the 'accordion school of mechanical design' - proving that sometimes the best solution to space constraints isn't minimalism, it's origami. It's the hardware equivalent of choosing composition over inheritance: why remove functionality when you can just make it collapsible? Meanwhile, Apple users are still carrying around a dongle bag that weighs more than the laptop itself
Apple axes Ethernet for thinness; Fujitsu shrinks it thinner than a legacy API layer - now that's hardware refactoring without breaking backwards compat
Apple: Ethernet is a dongle problem; Fujitsu: we shipped a hardware feature flag - RJ45 lazy‑loads from the chassis when you need strong consistency and deterministic 1 Gbps
Apple marked RJ45 as deprecated and pushed a USB‑C‑only breaking change; Fujitsu shipped an inlined compatibility shim - the drop‑jaw port - so the interface stays stable and our PXE deploys stop timing out