I agree Nigel. From the perspective of the live playing professionals or home players here who do not desire to send midi out to or from secondary tone generators or other external midi gear withoout having to go through a computer, probably not a big deal at all.

From the perspective of the rest of us, or more accurately, at least in my way of working, lack of standard midi ports is unacceptable, and I won't be needing any board that doesn't have it.

In my situation, it doesn't work out at all, not only because I have older keyboards without usb ports, but mainly BECAUSE I use a computer much of the time. I have both the Tyros 2 and Motif ES. Neither of my primary music computers can recognize both sets of the Yamaha usb midi drivers at the same time, meaning that without standard midi ports I could not, for example, use the ES as a controller for One Man Band while I use the T2 as a tone generator. I can pull this off only because my computers have soundcards that include standard midi in and out jacks. The T2 does not work with the ES usb midi drivers, and vice versa, and the drivers conflict with one another on every computer I have tried them on ( several ).

AJ