Idea for new expansion card layouts

Creators & Developers Expansion Card
1

I’m not an mechanical or electrical engineer so I may be off base but I’ve seen alot of discussions on the expansion cards and some of their short comings. Here are some suggestions that might make them more useful and flexible.

  1. Consider making a dedicated USB-C port somewhere that doesn’t take up an expansion slot. This port will always be needed for charging for the foreseeable future so making it use an expansion slot seems wasteful and inefficient.

  2. Instead of having 2/3 expansion slots that are physically separated, why not move the rails from the sides of the cards to the top and then remove the side rails/dividers. This would allow for more flexibility for different designs that could take up 1/1.5/2/3 expansion slots. Plus, you could probably still use the existing expansion cards with a plastic shell swap.

  3. With laptops, there are many common ports that users will always need such as USB-C for newer/faster devices, USB-A for backwards compatibility, and a HDMI/Display port for connecting to an external monitor. With the change in #2 you could design a single expansion card with these ports that is more space/resource efficient and possibly cheaper.

  4. With the changes above developers would have more room and flexibility to create new modules and new ideas.

2

Having all the USB-C be on expansion slots is neither wasteful nor inefficient. There’s more to having them on easily-replaceable cartridges than just being able to swap them out for something else. Connector longevity for USB-C is terrible, and being able to swap out the cartridges is by far the best solution currently available for that problem, on any laptop.

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3
  1. That’s a minor issue and having all the port replaceable is good for repair as USB-C ports can break or wear out over time.
  2. This is an interesting idea and for some internally more complicated expansion cards, a dual-width card would definitely make sense.
  3. It’s would be definitely possible to e.g. develop a combo dual width expansion card with e.g. a USB-C, a USB-A and an audio port. But Framework obviously can’t develop tons of expansion cards each with different port combinations. That would make logistics very difficult. So I can see why they didn’t do it.
  4. Definitely.

That said, I think in the future, usage of specific ports will be reduced. You can already use USB-C for video and audio outputs, charging, connecting an ethernet adapter cable and so on. So I feel like the need to develop new expansion card types won’t increase in the future and I’m not sure it makes sense for Framework to go into that direction.

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