Comment by lazyweb

I generally agree. But then again, we had Master/Slave IDE connectors, floppy drives, _extremely_ shitty CPU sockets (broke plenty of Sockel A / 370 cooler latches), nothing (including keyboards and mice!) was hot-pluggable ...

Regarding your last point: that's just market segmentation. Plenty of lanes on server CPUs. Remember Linus' rant about Intels refusal to offer ECC for consumer CPUs?