[AceJohnny2]

My first "real" laptop was a beast of a Dell workstation-class laptop in 2005. One of its key features for me was being able to swap out the CD drive for an extra battery.

Of course, by modern standards the thing weighed a ton. These days, my 15" MBP feels like a brick in my bike bag, and it's likely 30-50% lighter!

(Oh and fun fact: recently I wanted to test out Moore's Law, and see how the RasPi 4 compared to that Core Duo laptop (that I still have!) Well, the 18y-old laptop still handily beat out the RasPi4 in single-CPU performance! Moore's law can't quite make up for opposite market segments)

[majormajor]

Yeah, this used to be pretty common.

Through the 90s laptops came with expansion cards and often swappable bays. Even late-90s Mac laptops had two bays that you could swap batteries, DVD/CD/floppy drives into and out of, plus a PC Card slot that could take things like TV video capture cards or Wifi adapters.

I don't remember if PCMCIA slots had enough bandwidth to make external video cards practical (plus... it would require a separate monitor, I guess), though.

They all went away in the quest for lightweight size and capacity... especially as more things got built in.

[znpy]

> I don't remember if PCMCIA slots had enough bandwidth to make external video cards practical (plus... it would require a separate monitor, I guess), though.

PCMCIA surely not, but express card most likely.

I remember some mods installing an external GPU onto the mythical ThinkPad X220 by means of a bridge card that would fit in the express card slot and would allow a full pci-express to be connected. See: https://artemis.sh/2021/08/04/eGPU-on-thinkpad-x220.html

[toast0]

> I don't remember if PCMCIA slots had enough bandwidth to make external video cards practical (plus... it would require a separate monitor, I guess), though.

Original PCMCIA was 16-bit ISA (not sure the speed), CardBus was 32-bit, 33Mhz PCI with DMA and whatnot. Certainly there were many video cards on 16-bit ISA, but I wouldn't think you'd want to stuff one into a PCMCIA slot, maybe a hercules card so you could do monochrome/color multi-monitor; but multimonitor didn't really come into popularity until windows 98 and 2000 on the NT side; advanced graphics card back then were AGP, but some were released as 32-bit PCI as well; they almost certainly wouldn't have been able to be compacted to fit in the slot, but you could probably have a cardbus -> pci slot adapter and some ugly thing. A quick search doesn't find any, but I'd expect something to exist as a development tool.

[acomjean]

PCMCIA

I remember those slightly larger than a credit card (and thicker).

I had 2, and IBM one which had a eithernet and modem on it (and a really fun sparkly label). and a scsi one for a zip drive (they had parallel port zip drives... but)

[dabluecaboose]

I had one I got at the Spy Museum in DC that was a little compartment! In high school I used to keep a $20 bill in there in case I wanted to do something with my friends that cost money

[kitsunesoba]

I have a 2008 Dell workstation laptop (M4400) that had the swappable bays feature that I bought used around 2012 and used as my primary machine for several years (which as an aside, worked so, so much better than buying a brand new machine for the same price would've).

In my case I swapped the optical bay for a SATA bay which enabled quick swapping of SATA drives. For my usage at that point in time that ability was very handy… perfectly possible with an external USB gadget of course, but it was nice to have that without the cables and gadget. Most of the time that bay held a large HDD for "cold" storage, allowing the primary SATA slot to be filled with a fast 256GB SSD.

[thx-2718]

"(Oh and fun fact: recently I wanted to test out Moore's Law, and see how the RasPi 4 compared to that Core Duo laptop (that I still have!) Well, the 18y-old laptop still handily beat out the RasPi4 in single-CPU performance! Moore's law can't quite make up for opposite market segments)"

shouldn't power consumption also be a factor in comparing performance?

I would think an ARM would use less wattage than a Core 2 Duo.

[AceJohnny2]

Certainly, in a MIPS/W or MIPS/$, the RasPi beats the pants off the old laptop (Edit: which I now remember was a Dell Precision M65, which specs say weighed 2.81kg (6.2lb) (likely without extra battery), whereas my current MBP M1 Pro is 1.6 kg (3.5 lbs) so more than half as heavy!)

But I had the mistaken assumption that 15+ years of Moore's Law would certainly leave the old laptop in the dust, in the same way that "modern smartphone more powerful than an old supercomputer". It was interesting to be corrected!