Double height would be great. I thought about 3D printing some foldable feet for extra height. It should be doable!
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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!
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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.
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RS-232 COMM port for connecting to routers and switches. or maybe some kind of adapter port for it.
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DB-25 parallel port for my 20-year-old HP laser printer that just keeps on printing and printing, like a certain ad bunny. 
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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.
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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 
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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.
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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.
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@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.
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Of course. Best of luck with your lunch.
Dc-coupled audio I/O for use with (Eurorack) modular synthesizers would be awesome.
And also 3.5mm MIDI I/O.
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Ohhh that’s clever! You could probably 3D-print something that plugs into an expansion slot and clamps something like this docking station to the underside of the laptop:
Smaller options are of course possible as well, and I would probably just dock the Laptop with a single USB-C port 99% of the time. But the basic concept of adding expanded I/O to the underbelly of the Laptop seems very doable and would probably be quite interesting for many.
To be honest though, that doesn’t sound like a 13" Ultrabook, but an 18" desktop replacement. I think for someone with your I/O needs, a docking station is required. Or you have to wait until framework releases a gaming laptop 
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As I was bemoaning elsewhere, my 13" (okay, I think it’s actually 14", but it’s still a thin-and-light) has: 3 USB 3.1 (2 type A, 1 type C), full-size SD, SIM, mini-DP, full-size HDMI, RJ45 (ethernet), 2 mini-RCA (audio in/out) and power (barrel plug). That’s three less than Whinis, but still…
It also has a 3200×1800 display and a decent keyboard (full-sized arrows, separate page-up/page-down/home/end keys). And a top-tier processor (well, it was when it was new), 32 GB RAM (non-soldered, I want to say) and 2 m.2 slots.
“Ultrabook” doesn’t have to mean “massive compromises”, but I have yet to see anyone making a machine that isn’t a major step backward from what I have. Framework is close, they just need to fix the keyboard and screen and figure out how to add more ports. To be fair, I think the modularity idea isn’t bad, because most people don’t need ten ports, but at least six would be much more practical, especially with only a single m.2 slot onboard.
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So many ideas in here, and yet I can’t stop thinking about the snack drawer.
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Alternative power connections would be cool like a mag-safe connector and a standard barrel jack so that I can barrow other peoples chargers to charge the laptop or just reuse the ones I already have.
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