The low-end 14” plain M3 only has 2 TB/USB-C ports. They all also have HDMI ports and SD card slots, too.
I’ve not needed an HDMI port since retiring in 2019 (just about the time I bought my 2019 Intel 16 - incher). However, last month a dozen of my closest med school buddies and I assembled on Cape Cod for a 50th reunion that included migratory bird watching expeditions, cycling on the Cape Cod bike trail, crab and lobster feasts, and also “what have you been doing for the past 50 years” presentations.
Most other attendees were happy to send bundles of JPEGs to one of us who assembled them into .PPT files on his Windows laptop, but of course I eschewed that MS crud for a Keynote presentation from my Mac crafted with background transitions, photo and movie fades, etc. (the guy wrangling the JPEGS for everybody else also brought a Dell LCD projector that was equipped with HDMI input. Only one problem: I forgot my TB3/USBc<->HDMI adapter! So, after managing to wend my way through the impossible 17th-18th century maze of horsecars paths surrounding Logan Airport that Boston calls “streets,” I wasted time making my way into and out of Boston’s “big dig” tunnel—originally meant to expedite vehicular traffic—only to creep along at 0-2 mph for probably an hour or two before getting to my chosen Apple Retail Store (THANK YOU, Siri, iOS 16, and Apple Maps for helping me survive that) just to get an adapter.
However, for some reason an incompatibility between my laptop and the projector meant that when I launched Keynote in Ventura, the image from his projector blinked on and off incessantly, and even my “massive” 16" laptop screen didn’t suffice for me to tell my story to the audience.
The alternative was to convert my Keynote file to PPT (sacrificing a bunch of the video goodies in the process) the next day, then presenting it from the coordinator’s Windows laptop . Only problem with THAT was that my file was almost 1.5 GB in size, and his Windows laptop was equipped only with USB-A ports of some prior generation bereft of bandwidth.
I reminded my impatient buddies of the current market capitalizations of Dell and Apple, and also of Michael Dell’s “futurist” creds back when Steve Jobs was on “sabbatical” to NeXT. Mr. Dell had been asked what he’d recommend as a solution to Apple’s then serious financial and mission problems; his response had been something akin to "sell the office furniture, pay off the debts (of course, even then, Apple HAD none) and return whatever cash is left to the shareholders!
Actually, I have NO idea whether having a native HDMI port on my laptop would have prevented that embarrassing delay in my presentation, but it DID bring back memories.