I saw this on a Linus Tech Tips video today, and it’s pretty neat: the Khadas Mind is a tiny computer powered by an Intel Core i5-1340P or Core i7-1360P, but it has a souped-up PCIe connector at the bottom that allows you to hook it up to all kinds of other devices, like a graphics card, a dock, and so on. It looks slick and quite user-friendly, and according to the LTT video, the company intends to release the specs for the connector so that third parties can hook into it as well, but a promise is just that – a promise.
It’s way too early to tell if this will go anywhere – past attempts would suggest that sadly, it won’t – but that doesn’t mean it’s not an incredibly awesome and seemingly workable implementation of the modular PC idea.
Definitely a pretty idea, but history has not been kind to platforms which tried to use proprietary expansion standards when more open alternatives existed, like the IBM PC Jr. (sidecars), IBM PS/2 (MCA), or even the Apple Macintosh (NuBus, specially-BIOSed PCI or AGP cards, etc.). If Apple’s success is partly due to migrating away from markets where “Apple expansion cards are rarer and more expensive than PC expansion cards” was a complaint, and the rise of USB (and now Thunderbolt) as an external expansion standard with economices of scale, I don’t see their “Mind Link” expansion connector seeing much uptake.
Hell, as a retrocomputing enthusiast, I can tell you that one of the first things I looked for when choosing the first mac to put on my wishlist was “OK, having narrowed things down to macs that can run a version of classic Mac OS natively, and then further to ones that aren’t all-in-one so I can KVM in an external monitor, what models use the largest number of parts still readily available?”
I wound up receiving a Power Mac G4 Quicksilver 2002 as a gift, which uses IDE instead of SCSI for both the boot drive and the senile DVD drive I needed to replace (unlike Gen. 1 Power Mac G3 motherboards which can’t boot off their IDE), RAM I could still order warrantied/re-warrantied from Other World Computing (good, because 256MiB of the included 1GiB had gone bad), a PSU that only needs an easy-to-hand-wire adapter cable to replace with standard ATX as long as you either remove the rear plastic shroud (cutting it is unthinkable) or find a PSU with the correct placement of external features, an AGP video card that can be replaced if you either pick a replacement that can be re-flashed with the BIOS from the mac version or are OK with your screen staying black until the OS drivers load, and standard-size 120mm and 60mm case fans where only one uses a non-standard connector, which doesn’t matter if you wire your PSU adapter cable for it or power a replacement off a 5.25″ drive molex. (though it can be tricky to find a replacement for the 60mm fan with a high enough CFM rating.)
Given it’s the second-fastest single-core mac ever made and the fastest below 1GHz, I’m delighted with it. (I still need to get something to run System 7 and, if it doesn’t, something to run System 6 for compatibility with apps that don’t like System 7 or higher, but my retro-hobby corner has both a P1 dual-booting DOS and Win98SE and an Athlon64 running Windows XP, and I’d probably have needed three if I didn’t luck into a hand-me-down Windows 9x machine that wasn’t “legacy free”, so that’s hardly a criticism uniquely Apple.)
HP Inc. tried something like that some time ago: HP Elite Slice. Neat but doomed to niche,
So… a PC with extra steps and proprietary connectors.