The long awaited announcement of the intel based powerbook were announced this week(I have been hearing rumours of an intel apple for over a decade now).

I heard one disgruntled apple owner complain of a lack of PCMCIA slot. Apple has chosen the new ExpressCard standard. It will deter some people with expensive PCMCIA cards in moving up, but I doubt it will make much of an impact. Apple is famous to being on the front of the curve and more aggressive in adopting new standard physical formats from the 3.5 floppy in the Apple Plus to USB in the iMac. They have occasionally been proven wrong in their choices eg NuBus over ISA. But for the most part they have been on the right trail when everyone else comes over.

So ExpressCard looks like a winner format for physical hardware card expansion.