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ExpressCards, the new PCMCIA?
randallpowell writes "PC Cards will face competition from ExpressCards in 2005 and 2006. Newer notebook PCs will have them to add wireless, HD-TV broadcast viewing, back-up storage, and more. Microsoft, Dell, and Intel are the major backers of this new expansion slot technology. While smaller, they can easily help users expand their notebook's abilities while PC Cards slowly phase out."
This just seems really useless to me.
While cards are nice and compact, USB/Firewire are fast enough now to be able to do anything that pc. Granted they're good for adding things like wireless to old computers but I don't think the cardbus will be the bottleneck for sometime, so why get rid of the old standard.
Why don't they just try to make USB 3.0 the end all be all of interfaces and have 1 type of port.
Maybe this is more of a pc problem. I just finally used my card slot on my powerbook (for wireless) last month, and if I bought any new mac this would be unnecessary.
don't believe it
2 USB slots, which I use both of almost always (swapping is quite a hassle)
Rejoice, for I bring good tidings; There is a device called a 'USB Hub' that allows branching off of a single port. Since you're already dragging around multiple USB devices that you need to swap back and forth, another one won't be that big of a deal especially given the tiny sizes some of the hubs come in. Oh, and the PCMCIA slot you wish was replaced by '1 or 2' extra USB ports? You can get 2 or even 4 port USB PCCards if you don't want an external hub off the laptop's built in port. Check eBay; prices for those are under $20 including shipping.
I got one so my slightly older laptop could take advantage of USB 2.0. There's a good reason for having some kind of generic port on the side of the laptop. It was a LOT cheaper to get a card than a new laptop to use my USB 2.0 CD-RW drive. A year or so after these new slots are installed in laptops with FW800 and USB 2.0, there's going to be FW1600 and USB 3.0. For those who can't afford a whole new machine it sure is nice to just get a little card to take advantage of whatever new tech comes along.
Several problems. Not everyone is you... I use PCMCIA for gps, for a smartcard reader I play with, and for a few weird network cards when I'm playing around (token ring and arcnet... can't find the localtalk one). I'd even like to find a PCMCIA tv tuner someday...
And USB isn't a replacement. For one, it demands 500mA of power, per USB. Most laptops can't promise that, beyond 1-2, or at most, 3 usb ports. And then there is the entire bandwidth thing... USB was truly meant to be for pointers and keyboards, and other low bandwidth stuff. The protocol shows this, anytime you have 2 greedy devices wanting all the bandwidth. Even USB2 suffers from this.
And you'll rethink that integrated wireless, when one day it just stops working because a bad antenna/hinge design (and they're all bad, every single one) chews the antenna in half. And it will likely be 3 hours after the warranty is up.
Of course not. Why would you think a new connector that is basically does a superset of cardbus and USB would be capable of what the two of them aren't? How do you think this would work? Would it magically worm it's way into the connection between your LCD and the motherboard to handle I/O?
Making extra hardware in the LCD to convert NTSC or PAL into something it can understand would mean adding a processor to the LCD itself, which means the screen would be thicker and more cumbersome. Further, you don't get any of the advantages you get with a full system, such as the ability to encode and record inputs, and the opportunity to put the inputs in a place where they're less likely to break. No one would do that; it's a bad design.
If that's very important to you, just buy an LCD with that capability (they make them, but not for laptops). It'll be a lot thicker and heavier than the equivalent VGA-signal only laptop display. Or go with the USB, Firewire, or PCMCIA "anolog input solutions."
Mod me down and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine!
So, I'm expected to just upgrade for the joy of hardware troubleshooting?! Problem is, there is no compelling reason to break backward compatibility in this case - no new features, and the speed of existing cards generally isn't an issue.
That compatibility is expected to give ExpressCard a boost over prior PC cards in ease of installation and configuration with the Windows operating system...
Yeah, right. First of all, I'm no Windows fan, but it seems to me that PCMCIA was one of the few things that Windows did get right. If you had drivers for the device, Windows loaded them without hassle whenever you inserted the card. How much easier could it get?
Heck, even Linux works well with PCMCIA devices - to be honest, I don't even know which drivers my PCMCIA ethernet card uses because I've never had to figure it out. I just plug the card in, and it works.
Looks to me like a real flop. If you're going to break backward compatibility, you have to offer your customers a compelling reason to buy your product, i.e. better performance, new features, etc... I did RTFA, and it seems like the new Express architecture is little more than an excuse to keep engineers and programmers employed.
The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
What you call a 'choking hazard' the manufacturer calls 'uses less materials and is therefore cheaper to produce and thus less expensive for the consumer'.
Materials costs usually represent the smallest part of the cost of making an item, especially in anything as small as a card. In fact, smaller form factors can increase production costs, due to the greater precision needed to make it.
What the manufacturer really calls it is: 'inventing another incompatible form-factor so people can't use their old kit, forcing them to buy replacements for their otherwise perfectly good hardware.'