Thanks for the clarification! It's good to know that it does support thunderbolt, that does assuage some of my concerns regarding the expansion cards, though it does still make me question why you have something like a single usb type a slot as one of the options.

Do you mean that you'd think it should be a two port type-A module? The modules are just really really small. You might be able to fit two A ports on one but it'd be very tight. Especially since the sides need to be a bit thicker to accommodate the mechanical groove.

It'd be much more possible to physically fit a 2 port usbc module, but of course that comes with all sorts of annoying caveats and/or expensive hardware because properly port multiplying usbc (let alone thunderbolt) seems to be quite difficult.

Yeah, it just seems like a peculiar choice to turn a thunderbolt 4 port into a single type a port. I get that it's modular so you can just swap it out whenever you like, but then again, you can also just carry a dongle with you that has a whole plethora of ports. The expansion card options that exist right now don't really seem to fully utilize it (though I really like the full sized displayport expansion card).

There's certainly a lot of potential for more interesting expansion cards like an hdmi capture card, 10gb ethernet, or perhaps even some older serial ports or vga for compatibility with older equipment. I just hope that they survive to see some more iterations.

> I get that it's modular so you can just swap it out whenever you like, but then again, you can also just carry a dongle with you that has a whole plethora of ports.

I think you're missing a middle ground here, and that's that most people don't really want to carry around a dongle or swap things around all the time. The ability to swap the modules around is more about being able to choose a setup for your own needs that you keep in like 90% of the time, but still have the flexibility to change that over time or for short periods as needed.

Like, I absolutely want a usbc port on either side so I can plug power in either way, and then I also want an hdmi port and a usba port every now and then, so that's my standard setup. I don't really change them out much (in fact, I'm much more likely to rearrange them for the sake of convenience, like swapping the hdmi port and the usb port because that's where the cable I need is).

But that's a unique setup to me, and while I'm sure there are laptops that have a setup roughly like this the last thing I want to be constrained by when buying a laptop is stupid questions about where and how many ports there are.

Meanwhile there are people who just WILL NOT EVER buy a laptop without an sd card reader and that's just a waste of space for me. We both get what we want.

I would probably buy an ethernet port though, and I might swap that back and forth with hdmi depending on what I'm doing that week. That said, narrow profile ethernet is such a mechanical pain in the ass I do not blame anyone for not trying to make it.

I think maybe they could make a model with 6 bays instead of 4, but I assume for this version they were constrained by the thunderbolt controller in the intel chipset they're using.