I found a fun little design while looking over the refurbished laptop I had bought. It was a Dell Latitude E6230, which had an ExpressCard slot. I've never used a laptop in a way that required add-on hardware. No PCMCIA, no ExpressCard, etc. Few of my laptops even had provisions for an expansion slot. But I remembered one of them -- an old Dell XPS M1330 -- included a little bit of creativity. Rather than the typical blank piece of plastic placeholder, the expansion slot held an infrared remote control with simple media buttons like "Play", "Pause", etc. This lets people use the little laptop as a media player where they can sit back away from the keyboard and still be able to control playback.

This laptop is from Dell's business-oriented Latitude line, so it would not be keeping with product position to have such entertainment-oriented accessories. But I was curious if it had more than just a blank piece of plastic placeholder. So even though I had no ExpressCard to install, I popped out the blank to take a look. I was happy to see that someone put some thought into the design: the blank plate is a small ruler with both inch and millimeter measurements.

This feature cost them very little to implement, and it would never be the make-or-break deciding factor when choosing the laptop, but it was a fun touch.