Apple's MacBook Pro will be the first model to feature an ExpressCard slot, which is a smaller and more versatile interface to the PCI-Express serial standard. The card slot handles one lane of traffic, which is 250 MB/s or about 2 Gbps.

http://www.apple.com/macbookpro/whatsinside.html http://www.expresscard.org/web/site/qa.jsp

Apple vice president David Moody confirmed in a briefing this afternoon, that Apple thought the best way to provide performance and flexibility was not to include FireWire 800 as a fixed port on the models.

Instead, with 2 Gbps of bandwidth from the slot, an ExpressCard could, for instance, offer two simultaneous FireWire 800 ports that could run at full speed. This could support an extremely fast set of RAID 0 (striped) disks, for instance, with four disks being striped in an A, B, C, D fashion for a total throughput of 1.6 Gbps, limited only by the disks read and write speeds.

While the PC Card and CardBus card slots found in PowerBooks and other laptops have aged poorly, finding little except advanced wireless cards (PC only, typically) and cellular data cards to occupy them, it's likely that the extremely high throughput of the ExpressCard slot will result in more options for moving data around.

Because the MacBook Pro can support a 30-inch Apple display--it has the dual-link technology built-in--the obvious notion of a second monitor supported by an ExpressCard adapter makes no sense. But a third monitor? You got it.