Small battery modules would be neat if you were traveling and needed to eek out some additional battery life.
14 Likes
How about a double expansion card, with hub features?
What I am thinking of would use both expansion slots on one side of the laptop and would extend past the laptop edge, allowing for four or more connections on one side of the device.
External keyboard, monitor, mouse, and something else.
Would probably be ok for lower data flow usage.
For higher data volume, use the single connections on the other side.
10 Likes
As others have mentioned, an ethernet expansion card would be be a must. I’m a network engineer and having to carry around USB to ethernet adapters suck, even worse are these thin laptops that have limited IO and I have to get a a USB C to USB A HUB to then plug in a USB to ethernet adapter sucks.
On top of that, there are times when I need to be plugged into multiple networks at the same time. Standing in a data center with a USB c to USB A hub with 3+ ethernet dongles hanging off of the hub so I can be plugged into a WAN router, switch, and SAN switch all at the same time sucks. So being able to throw in 3 ethernet expansion cards would be awesome.
21 Likes
+1 million for an internal USB A
Also interested in 10gbit ethernet, (or 1 gbit if that’s too ambitious). I put in a pre-order cuz I think it’s a neat concept. But it’d be nearly useless to me without an ethernet.
Dual USB (a and c) would be nice too, as would RS-232 and similar.
12 Likes
I’m pretty sure tiny batteries the size of an expansion card would not give more than 5 minutes of battery life, I think for this kind of use case a regular powerbank would be way more useful
7 Likes
I would love to see a double-height card.
Seriously. Maybe it needs to be taken off to throw the laptop in a bag (but that’s easy, right?), but having “legs” would be good for ventilation, and I expect the extra physical space would be hugely useful. RJ45 jack with no folding, maybe dual ports, and you could even do clever things like have a port sticking out front/back (relative to the laptop) rather than the side.
24 Likes
Double height would be great. I thought about 3D printing some foldable feet for extra height. It should be doable!
22 Likes
Along the lines of a microcontroller card, I’d be interested in an ARM CPU that could be used for running ARM applications natively on the machine. Obviously there’s not a ton of space for a super high-powered chip, but an Raspberry Pi 4-equivalent would be sufficient for dev work.
AWS has been rolling out ARM servers and adoption rates are high, so there’s a need to build for both amd64 and arm64 that is going to become more salient over time.
Edit: Same again for RISC-V. Having a local machine to run native code is super useful.
14 Likes
A ATSAME51J19 would be an interesting choice for a microcontroller with a 2 MB SPI FLASH chip. IT has Cortex M4 Core with floating point support and 512KB Flash and 192KB RAM. It could provide a number of I/O choices including I2C, CAN Bus, I2S input and output, SERCOM, PWM, and ADC. IT also has a built in crypto engines with AES (256 bit), true RNG, Pubkey controller. With the SPI Flash Chip it could run Micropython as well and Arduino Code With a UF2 bootloader.
2 Likes
NFC and RFID, Thunderbolt, SDR (software defined radio), yubikey, HSM, arm microcontroller, ethernet, fpga, LoRa module, Ubertooth
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Honestly multiple USB-A per slot. While I love that this is fully repairable and replaceable “upgrading” to this would set me back nearly 5 ports. Current laptop has Power (separate), sd card, 3 audio jacks, 4 usb ports, hdmi, 2 display ports. Being limited to just 4 ports and one of them must be used for charging means that I have lost most of my laptop.
9 Likes
I would love to see a smart card/badge reader type of expansion or default integration for larger modules in the future! I would definitely buy one if that was an option!
1 Like
That’s a neat idea. I use UART and JTAG/SWD all day long, imagine an expansion card with something like an STLINK V3 module in it. UART with or without 232 or 485 txcvrs would be great.
5 Likes
RS-232 COMM port for connecting to routers and switches. or maybe some kind of adapter port for it.
2 Likes
DB-25 parallel port for my 20-year-old HP laser printer that just keeps on printing and printing, like a certain ad bunny. 
3 Likes
HP LaserJet 4 Plus, with networking and Postscript and expanded memory. I think it needs new feed rubbers, since it jams a little too often, when printing more than a page or two.
2 Likes
Something I forgot earlier but meant to mention, with respect to all the requests for multiple ports per card and folks talking about how you’d lose bandwidth… there are plenty of devices that only need USB 2.0 or even USB 1.0. USB 3.0 cables are still somewhat hard to find (most of the cables for sale are still USB 2.0), and frankly, USB 2.0 is quite acceptable for swapping files with my smart devices or using adb. And I can’t be the only one that uses an external mouse 
.
Another option would be a dual USB-C card where one of the ports is only power in with the data lines not even connected.
7 Likes
Ethernet would be amazing. I use it all the time as I work in a lot of brick/concrete spaces that kill the wifi signal.
7 Likes
@Alexander_Steffen Welcome to the community! The team have said that Ethernet is a priority, but obviously they’re busy now getting ready for the first shipments of what’s already available. I’d expect to see an Ethernet card possibly late summer, but obviously the team will have a better estimate than my pure guesswork.
3 Likes
Of course. Best of luck with your lunch.