2024-2025 EliteBook and Zbook are pure nonsense. No USB-A, but deprecated RJ45

[Hale_JP]

I am trying to order a 64GB/AMD workstation. And the keyword here is WORK — a station for WORK. Not for showing off, or making an invaluable experience of a Guinea Pig.

Both the EliteBook and ZBook have only one USB-A port.

Are you serious?

How can I connect countless actuators and test board interfaces? You are an IT tech company — you should know that USB hubs are time-splitting devices, not very reliable, and very messy.

You promote this for the WORK environment with fanfares and a circus performance?

Be honest:

How many USB memory drives do you have with a USB-C connector?

Okay, how many wireless mouse dongles do you have with a USB-C connector?

Oh, and RJ45 took one USB-A spot.

Are you serious?

LAN adapters are the last thing that needs to be embedded in a laptop — for two decades, all of them have been external, and yes, USB-C recently.

Our IT manager is seriously suggesting I move to Lenovo — a Chinese plastic brick with zero support. Why? Because there's no such nonsense! Two or three USB-A ports, out of the box, with no special request. 64GB RAM, out of the box, with no special order.

If you really want to secure your corporate/designer market — throw away ALL but one USB-C port immediately, and restore 6 (SIX!) USB-A ports. WORK. WORK IS A PRIORITY!

[Raqeeb26]

Hello @Hale_JP ,

Welcome to The HP Support Community.

Thank you for posting your query, I will be glad to help you.

I read your post and I have to say, on a personal, technical level, I understand your frustration 100%. You are voicing a major pain point that many of us in engineering and technical fields feel.

You are not a "Guinea Pig," you're a professional who needs tools that work, and your points are all completely valid.

• On Hubs: You are absolutely correct. For the kind of I/O you're talking about (actuators, test boards, debuggers), a simple, passive USB hub is not a reliable solution. They are time-splitting devices, as you said, and they introduce latency, power instability, and more points of failure. It's not a 'workstation-grade' setup.
  
  
• On Peripherals: Your point about mouse dongles and USB drives is spot-on. I am looking at my desk right now: my Logitech Unifying receiver is USB-A. My YubiKey is USB-A. My external backup drive is USB-A. The "all-USB-C" world that designers are pushing for hasn't fully arrived for the peripherals we all own and trust.
  
  
• On the RJ45: I see your point. From a designer's perspective, they're trading one "legacy" port (USB-A) for another (RJ45) because many corporate/secure environments have a "no-WiFi" policy and demand a hard-wired connection. But your logic is sound: a USB-C/Thunderbolt port can handle a LAN adapter reliably, whereas a USB-A port is much more critical for device I/O.

There is an intense, industry-wide push for thinner, lighter, and simpler chassis designs, which has driven this move to consolidate around USB-C and Thunderbolt. The "ideal" is that one Thunderbolt port can do everything.

For your specific "WORK" environment, the intended (and really, the only reliable) solution isn't a cheap, messy hub. It's a workstation-grade Thunderbolt dock (like the HP Thunderbolt Dock G4).

This is a critical distinction. A proper dock isn't just a hub; it has its own chipset and dedicated bandwidth. It's designed to live on your desk and break out that single Thunderbolt connection into the 3-4 USB-A ports, dual displays, and networking you need, all with the power and stability required for a lab environment. The laptop becomes the "portable" part, and the dock is the "station."

That said, I know that doesn't help when you're in the field or at a different bench and need to plug in two things at once.

Your IT manager isn't wrong about Lenovo. Their ThinkPad P-series has famously kept more legacy ports for precisely the reasons you've listed, and it's a key differentiator for them.

I can't make any promises, but I can tell you that feedback like this—especially passionate, well-articulated feedback from a real-world workstation user—is what product managers need to see. I will personally be saving this thread and sharing it internally as a prime example of what our high-performance customers are facing.

Please , do let me know if you need any other assistance, will be happy to assist you 🙂

I hope you have a good day ahead,

And Feel free to ask any other queries as well,