I got the impression that also their functioning brain power was highly limited and not quite capable of holding a full transhuman. I think who ever is in a pod might be at best a gamma grade ego

It can be the best of both worlds if you're sporting a purpose-built body that was designed with performance in mind. A Shaper, for example, is a pretty swanky bod that's custom built for espionage, and if you're sporting a Whiplash then you aren't being cheap, you're making a bold (some would say crass) statement. The problem (as far as a lot of small minded NPCs are concerned) is that most Pods [i]aren't[/i] purpose-built bodies that were designed with performance in mind. They're cheap no-frills units that were designed for economy, using off-the-shelf robotics that can be easily mass produced without state of the art fabbers or medical facilities, combined with the bare minimum of pseudoorganic components to make them feel more natural to live in than a Synth morph. The Worker Pod is probably the most common Pod morph in the solar system, not because it's awesome but because there are millions and millions of former infugees in the Inner System who couldn't afford better (or weren't given better under the terms of their indenture). Plus another part of it is just plain old prejudice. The vast bulk of transhumanity isn't really transhuman by choice, and up until a decade ago they were living a comfortably middle class and very human existence on Earth. They never asked to leave everything behind and join an interplanetary culture whose inhabitants get new bodies the way folks back home used to get new cars, and they see their time as Infomorphs as a hardship they had to suffer durng a refuge crisis, not as an opportunity to redefine themselves or expand their boundaries. So when they finally save up enough to get a physical body they want something [i]normal[/i], even if its a lot fiddlier to make and it requres a lot of expensive life support and it can't survive extreme conditions. And since most societies (and especially most Hypercorp-ran societies) encourage normality as a way of maintaining stability, a Biomorph is seen as something to aspire to while a Pod Morph is seen as something to settle for until you can afford the real thing. And I just realised that the expense of maintaining Biomorphs is probably part of what gives them status. If you're human(ish) then you need a lot of food and water and oxygen. And you need access to protective gear that a lot of Pods and Case designs might not need for dangerous work. And you need room. You need room to sleep, room to work, room to socialise, and room to exercise, and all of it needs to be kept above freezing point (or below boiling point, which can be an even bigger hassle in some places), thoroughly radiation-shielded, and kept pressurised with an atmospheric mix that humans can breathe comfortably. And you need a place in the panic room for if there's ever a life support failure, and some sort of means of escape that can keep you alive if the whole settlement is evacuated. So if you're sleeved in a Biomorph, even if it's just something plain like a Splicer, you're basically saying that you can afford to pay for all the ongoing expenses of keeping eighty kilos of fragile warm-blooded human alive in space.

Aren't there penalties for sleeving into pods? Representing their sort of unnatural feeling to the transhuman mind. Most are stigmatized for being a poor, economic model, rather than swanky Olympian and Exalt bodies that the elite sleeve into. It is the whole Meritocracy model's dark side: "if we all get what we have earned and deserved, and you have crap, you must be worth crap." Sleeving into a Pod is less stressful than a Synth, but it is a poor person's choice, and the inner system is rife with prejudice.

In my games the anti-pod stigma is purely a function of cost vs. the desire to have a squishy meat body. Pods are much easier to produce and can be produced much faster than any biomorph, therefore they are much less expensive. The only people who use pods are the ones who can't afford a real biomorph (or so the marketing department would tell you). This follows from a houserule in which I've nerfed healing vats extensively. Under the core rules, a healing vat can reconstruct you from just your head in what, 2 days? If they can do that, there is really no reason bio-morphs would be rare or valuable, and no need the concept of pods (as discrete from say, a biomorph with just a cyberbrain). By nerfing healing vats I've emphasized the "designer automobile" approach: biomorphs are expensive to design (2-3 years of design work), and take ~2 years to force grow to maturity (if they're not born naturally). Conversely, pods are heavily cybernetic and can be assembled from "off the shelf" organs that are grown individually. This also means that getting a custom-made pod is much easier than a custom-made biomorph. Semi-related, there have been good discussions about economics of the (magic) healing vats in other threads.

First off, pods don't have underdeveloped brains. Or, rather, every pod gets a cyberbrain to replace it with as part of the pod creation process. This is also where the "hacking vulnerability" comes in, though that's easily circumvented with good opsec scores or just simply turning off your mesh inserts (Ectos are cheap and retro, embrace them!) and making sure nobody plugs an ethernet cable into your skull. In exchange, we get an automatic mnemonic memory (If the DM tells you that you can't recall something, they are LYING!), and resistance to psi attacks. It should be noted that synthmorphs also have cyberbrains and the associated drawbacks.

pretty sure the rule book said making a biomorph took months but regeneration was a different ruleset. Meat is easy to fabricate. neural pathways not so much

I imagine that the ego-bridge doesn't rewire the whole brain, just those sections concerning memory and personality. Otherwise you wouldn't be able to sleeve into, say, and Octomorph because the neuronal connections to the tentacles wouldn't be have anywhere to wire up to in the brain. Similarly, any enhancements your initial morph gave to Cog/Int due to it's enhanced neural structure would come with you when you resleeve.

On pods: [i]"Pods (from “pod people”) are vat-grown, biological bodies with extremely undeveloped brains that are augmented with an implanted computer and cybernetics system. [...] Because pods underwent accelerated growth in their creation, and were mostly grown as separate parts and then assembled, [b]their biological design includes some shortcuts and limitations, offset with implants and regular maintenance.[/b]"[/i] This would seem to imply that part of the reason pods are cheap are because they're more expensive to maintain, and furthermore, when we look at their capabilities holistically, cyberbrains in EP tend to not be as advanced as biological brains in terms of capabilities. Part of the price you pay when making pods is forgoing the possibility for advanced neural architectures, since you're running large parts of the brain - especially the decision-making parts - on cyberbrain hardware and architecture. You could probably make a pod grown from Menton genes while using the cyberbrain parts of a Savant in order to create a pod with a powerful neural architecture, but then you're stuck with the task of integrating an underdeveloped Menton brain with the hardware solutions used in the Savant. That gives you a more technologically advanced solution to problem that already has two simple solutions. This probably offsets the cost benefits that pods have in general. On resleeving: [i]"Resleeving takes about an hour in a properly equipped clinic. In essence, the process works like uploading in reverse. The new sleeve is hooked up to an ego bridge which infiltrates the brain with nanobots that physically restructure the brain’s neural structure and connections according to the map provided by the backup.[/i] [i]Sleeving takes six times as long as uploading because the nanobot swarm working as a wet printer in the template brain needs to duplicate the entire physical structure of the ego’s neural network. For resleeving, a “wet” ego bridge is used, meaning that the sleeve and ego bridge are submerged in a vat filled with nanogel. [b]The resleeving process for pods takes only half an hour, as pods brains are half biological and half cyberbrain.[/b]"[/i] (Fun fact - this seems to imply that sleeving-time is proportional to brain volume...) The relevant parts on uploading: [i]"When activated, the ego bridge’s sensor array twists open like a morning glory blossom, revealing an enclosure with a neck rest that automatically adjusts itself to morphs with oddly-sized or -shaped heads. The neck rest deploys millions of specialized nanobots into the brain and central nervous system. The petals are full of sensors that image the brain using a combination of MRI, sonogram, and positional information broadcast by the nanobot swarm in the morph’s brain.[/i] [i][...] In the case of pods, the ego bridge scans the biological brain bits and also accesses the cyberbrain to copy the parts of the ego residing there.[/i]" This does say that resleeving process involves restructuring the entire brain of the morph to match the Ego's old neural architecture, but I'll note that it says nothing about creating the brain cells from scratch; it probably just does work with what's already there. Hence, you can't transfer the benefits of a Menton to a Flat, because the Flat doesn't have the fancy kind of brain cells, synapse cells and chemical glands that the Menton has to augment its intelligence. (Personally though, I'm far more a fan of the non-canonical "interpretation" that resleeving is less invasive, and rather than doing a grand restructuring of the brain, it instead translates the Ego's cognome map structure to the morph's brain's cognome map like a compiler translating higher-level code to run on a specific CPU architecture. This allows resleeving to take advantage of specific neural structures, as well as avoiding the problems that come with having magical nanomachines that can rewire 300 [i]billion[/i] synapses per second...)

Asyncs have trouble performing while in a pod. Conversely, pods resist sleights used on them.