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I agree that most users could care less about the CPU architecture unless they happen to be the sort of user who wants to run big-memory apps and really needs a 64-bit address space. For those users, it makes sense for Apple to stick with the G5's in the big tower configurations, at least until Intel goes x86-64 across their product line and Apple can do one final migration.

Yeah. That would make the most sense. Yet another big recompile stage coming up in the future then...

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Probably the most intriguing feature on the new MacBook is that they dropped PCMCIA and went with ExpressCard/34. This is the next-generation standard from the PCMCIA people, and it comes in two form factors: one 34mm wide, and the other 54mm wide. Electrically, it's PCI Express, so it's blazingly fast.

ExpressCard is USB 2 as well. It is up to the manufacturer of the card to decide what to use. I guess a majority of cards will be USB 2 anyway so the manufacturer can just release it in a little external box for desktop PCs as well.