My Megahertz XJack never snapped off, but it felt precarious and ugly. Imagine some Cat-5 with RJ45 connector pointing down, snapped into this narrow XJack frame, stiff cable sticking up beside your typing fingers and tension pulling on it.
3Com also had a proprietary connector on the PCMCIA card edge, and an adapter cable of a few/several inches that went from that to a bulky RJ45 socket housing with an LED on it. It meant carrying the adapter with your laptop, but the experience during use felt a little better. The PCMCIA-side of the adapter stuck out a bit and wasn't a very solid attachment, but that might've been partly by design. If the cable gets jerked, the connector might pull out before dashing the much more expensive laptop to the floor.
Overall, I liked the Xircom RealPort PCMCIA/CardBus cards of the same era, which took up the space of 2 PCMCIA slots, and basically added 1 or more flush connectors to the side of your laptop. https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_nkw=xircom%20realport
3Com also had a proprietary connector on the PCMCIA card edge, and an adapter cable of a few/several inches that went from that to a bulky RJ45 socket housing with an LED on it. It meant carrying the adapter with your laptop, but the experience during use felt a little better. The PCMCIA-side of the adapter stuck out a bit and wasn't a very solid attachment, but that might've been partly by design. If the cable gets jerked, the connector might pull out before dashing the much more expensive laptop to the floor.
Overall, I liked the Xircom RealPort PCMCIA/CardBus cards of the same era, which took up the space of 2 PCMCIA slots, and basically added 1 or more flush connectors to the side of your laptop. https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_nkw=xircom%20realport
(I mentioned all 3 of these kinds of cards, in a vagabonding laptop writeup at the time: https://www.neilvandyke.org/linux-thinkpad-560e/ )