Ever since Apple released their m1 imac, I’ve been in love with the idea of the power brick doing both charging and data in a single neat unit, and I think we could take that a step further by re-using expansion cards.
The idea is to have a GaN brick, maybe 60w, with a removable 2 prong ac cord, and 4 expansion slots, unpopulated. This hub would have to handle both data and power.
One of my biggest problems with the expansion cards, is that they become unwieldy dongles if thrown into a backpack, and a worse experience to use than normal accessories if not slotted into a framework.
With this, we could have 4 cards in the framework, and an additional 4 in the charging brick (at least 1 would have to be usb c). This would let us keep 8 cards organized at a time, and allow us to dynamically alter cards between devices as our needs change. Would also be incredibly useful for other devices to be able to plug into this system. Bandwidth would be limited for cards in the charger, but that can be planned around. I would rather have the 2.5gbps network adapter live on the charger, still theoretically leaving ~7gbps of data to share between 2 more cards
(maybe the brick could ship with ac prongs and no cable, but leave the “oo” port useable by cheap 2 prong cables if desired, like the apple chargers.
example device I see this emulating, but with expansion cards instead of integrated ports.
https://www.amazon.com/ADG-Charger-Docking-Charging-Ethernet/dp/B096VZP23B/ref=sr_1_3?crid=NO8YQE5TM52F&keywords=usb+c+gan+hub&qid=1663253860&sprefix=usb+c+gan+hub%2Caps%2C96&sr=8-3
