The death of the PCIe expansion card
It's a demand issue.Business users get: laptops, mostly. You need a desktop? It's either because you aren't trusted/don't need to take a laptop around or because you need a workstation. The low end doesn't need PCIe slots for anything: integrated GPUs are good enough to do all generic business work, integrated sound, network, blah blah blah.So we've identified workstations as the business case for more PCIe slots. The AMD workstation CPUs (ThreadRipper and EPYC-P)have lots and lots of PCIe lanes. More than that. The Intel workstation CPUs ... don't. G12 has 16xPCIe 5 and 4xPCIe 4.  So you buy AMD this year.Home users: either you're a casual gamer or a hardcore gamer. Either way, you need a maximum of 2 PCIe slots for GPUs, and you're done.What's left? People on HN who run server and workstation tasks on repurposed desktop hardware, some of whom buy used server gear and live with the noise, some of whom buy AMD workstation gear