I’d like to have the expansion bay shell equipped with some connectors to the rear in order to free up desktop space at the sides of the laptop. Power connector, DisplayPort connections and ethernet would make good use of the otherwise empty space between the cooling fans. Could also be in the form of a couple bays for the existing small expansion modules. Am I the only one with this desire?
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One of the great things about the expansion bay is the possibility for options like this. It means the laptop can be more things to more people. I wouldn’t use an expansion module like this, but I imagine some would.
I think an I/O expansion bay is a good idea. I had a similar thought. That way, when someone is “docking” the laptop at their desk they can have the connections in the back. This would preclude the GPU module, but maybe one of the ports could be a Thunderbolt/USB4, or even some other type of connector that could allow an external GPU to be used.
The expansion bay connector does not expose the internal DisplayPort signals output by the iGPU, so it isn’t generally possible to add a native DisplayPort output port to an expansion bay. DisplayLink might work, if you put a USB controller in the expansion bay, but DisplayLink is pretty awful compared to a native output, and this also seems unnecessarily expensive.
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I strongly support this idea. Expansion bay can be even more functional. It’d be nice to see a thunderbolt port and Ethernet ports on the back something like on Lenovo Legion 5 series.
Once equipped with the graphics card, how does the signal from that reach the internal screen? And if it indeed does reach, can’t that way be used in reverse? Might need some active elements, but there are 8 pretty fast PCI lanes sitting unused if the dedicated graphics card is not installed.
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