Mac expandability issues

My Question is “can the current lineup of macs be updated/upgraded by any normal consumer products aside form the RAM?”

Almost all PCI expansion cards sold today are of the ageing 33MHz standard, even so it is the “status quo” and hence is what the overwhelming majority of the desktop computing world uses them. In fact it’s challenging to find and extended PCI card.

Standard 33MHz PCI cards wont fit in the 64-MHz or 133-MHz PCI-X slots, in addition to that extended PCI slots run different voltages.
This means that if an owner wishes to add extra USB2, Firewire, sound card, or a TV card etc; they in most cases, cannot.

None of the current lineup of Macs has the ability to add a second optical drive (5¼”), or a 3½” removable disk drive. This angers me because external drives are expensive and traditionally slower than internal drives.
And in the case of the “I” and “E” macs the graphics card cannot be upgraded with out a great deal of pain. However it is good to see that they have moved away from the hopeless GeForce4MX to the not so hopeless heat generating GeForceFX5200. (I am interested to see how they solve the cooling issues in counted on the PC models)

I also found it interesting that apple changed the side of the case on which the motherboard is mounted. This is not criticism; just interesting that apple chose to move away from the traditional (ATX) right hand mounting found in all the tower G4’s, and desktop PC’s.

I am impressed by the New PowerPC 970 powered macs but like many others I sit on the fence between the promising and earlier released (April03) AMD-64, which has now been released in a 2GHz model, and the next revision of the Power mac G5. For me to move to mac the expandability issues must be solved”

check ou the attchment to compare the extended and standard PCI slots