In the same spirit of new hardware/software making old OS'es obsolete -- will empty slots on motherboards (e.g., PCI or ISA) become a thing of the past? Here one might include, even memory `slots' and modular motherboard construction, in general.
More and more, what used to be separate video cards, sound cards, dialup modems are built into the motherboard. If any of this does not work, one has single point failure and must replace the whole motherboard, not just one electronic `card'. Slots allow, to some extent one to use older circuit boards (in a sense older ram modules too) on newer computers. One can see why manufactures would will to make this hard or impossible - so you must buy new versions of old things whenever you buy a newer computer. I suppose, if PC makers had their way, we would need to throw away every hardware part of our older computers and just buy everthing all overagain, when when got a new computer -- make them all one piece. To some extent, makes have been like that for years, and their is that new trend to make monitors and pcs/macs all one unit, unstead of two pieces.
