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Among the features to be included in upcoming ThinkPads are 15 millimeter removable Zip drives, eventually to be included across the entire product line, Interesting that they chose the Zip over the LS-120 floppy or the like. Hopefully this drive will be interchangeable with a floppy or CD-rom. Yet another dilemma... and a removable dual CD-ROM/floppy drive module for the ThinkPad 360 line, Thought they had this already. Keyboards will also be redesigned, with the company opting to go with more traditional laptop keyboards over the ThinkPads' current raised keyboard. IBM, *please* don't mess up the Thinkpad keyboard. It can be improved and I hope it is, but it's still the best keyboard out there and is one of my main reasons for buying a Thinkpad. If you want to make Thinkpads more like other laptops, do it by including Soundblaster-compatible audio and a standard modem, replacing the Mwave board that has to be downloaded by proprietary software using secret interfaces before it can be used. >> IBM is expected to use Intel as the motherboard >> manufacturing house, rather than use its own facilities, >I guess that means we can kiss off any notion of alternate CPU's >like PPC, Cyrex, AMD. You didn't seriously think IBM was going to use anything but, did you? They're a premium brand--they'll use premium brand parts. The only exception to Intel chips in the ThinkPad line was IBM's own licensed-from-Intel chip. But basically, this is part of the value proposition IBM makes with their ThinkPads. But hey, I'm just a business guy. ;-) Some current thinkpads use these CPU's, maybe they'll stop.