That's the point. It's a product differentiator. To make you buy the Macbook Pro instead of the Macbook. If you're editing DV with an older version of FCP or doing basic video stuff with iMovie, there's no real reason to pay more for a Pro instead of a regular Macbook - the regular Macbook will cope easily. So they took away the Firewire port to incentivise us to pay another few hundred dollars. They figure the kind of people who want to edit video would be prepared to pay extra. Which leaves the Macbook as an over-muscled word processor. It's a shitty move, but business as usual for Apple.
A lot of consumer grade video cameras are moving to USB. USB 3.0 is coming next year, which will be faster than Firewire - almost 5Gbits/ second. To try and compete with this, Apple are releasing a Firewire upgrade - 1600 and 3200, which will only run at 1.6GBits and 3.2GBits/ second. So Firewire will be slower than USB, and will die out soon enough. It's Apple's own fault, really. Following their usual business model, they kept their per-unit royalties so high for Firewire that nobody else wanted to use it, and USB became the industry standard not because it was the best, but because it was cheap. Sound familiar? So instead of taking a smaller percentage of the whole market, they'll end up with a larger percentage of nothing. Idiots. Rupert http://twittervlog.tv On 17-Oct-08, at 8:13 AM, Jay dedman wrote: On Thu, Oct 16, 2008 at 3:30 PM, John Coffey <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Apple is discontinuing FW 400 from new Macbook and MacBook Pros. (Pro will > have FW 800). > Will this be a problem getting mini DV footage into the Pro via 800. I > played around with a FW adapter once and couldn't get the camera to mount on > the finder. If this is a problem, I may have to quick get a refurbished > Macbook Pro to keep my Sony FX1 happy. > Gonna experiment with my Powerbook tonight. > Thoughts...Thnkx John I find it also strange. The Macbook only has USB 2.0. NO firewire. http://www.apple.com/macbook/specs.html I know many hard drives are now using USB 2.0....but come on. whats the thought process here. I was editing on FCP using the Powerbook G3...which was slow slow slow. The Macbook is plenty powerful for editing video. Jay -- http://jaydedman.com 917 371 6790 [Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
