Steve de Mena
Should I only apply criteria that apply to all users? I'm a Pro user that this machine is targeted for. Audio professionals, especially Pro Tools users, generally use one or more PCIe slots.

ZnU
To a large extent this is merely an 'Apple got rid of the floppy drive and now I have to buy an external one' sort of situation, however. Given a year or two, there will likely be native Thunderbolt pro audio interfaces, etc. A lot of this stuff is already there in the pro video world, where it seems like Thunderbolt uptake has been faster. In general, the native Thunderbolt devices are a lot smaller than a PCIe card in an external TB enclosure, and some of them are also bus powered.

As far as the lack of internal drive bays... maybe that is a bother for some users, but in pro video individual projects are so large that it makes more sense to use SAN storage or external RAID boxes than to rotate projects on and off of internal drives. The machines in our suites are already SSD-only internally -- system, apps and scratch go there, everything else is external.

Sandman
Whoa, welcome back, ZnU. Have you been lurking all these years? :)

ZnU
Not really. I've mostly been over in the Ars Technica forums.