Serious audio and video users should always use a separate drive and not the boot one to record this type of information.
I guess you never heard of the word portability.
It's not always practical to have dangling drives hanging off a laptop when it needs to be moved often (Having to move the FW audio device is bad enough). I backup to an external. There is no reason what-so-ever to record music to an external. The internal 7200 RPM is far higher performance than even FW800 is capable of and the faster the drive the more tracks you can simultaneously lay down. If anything, it would be better to boot off an external and lay the tracks down on the internal if maximum performance is your goal unless you have an eSata card (not likely on most newer MBPs since they have no expansion, although that should change with Thunderbolt). It wouldn't be good for either setup if the external drive got accidentally unplugged and with chintzy/loose FW connectors, it's a real possibility. (no danger of that one with a single internal).
Your comment that "
where everyone else has the same needs and desires as yourself or they must be crazy" applies to you as well.
Mine is just a single example of why someone might want to replace the internal drive to the poster that implied no one would
ever need to. Your post seems to serve no purpose other than to try to argue about it. Price is another good reason. It's often cheaper to get a small internal drive (or with ram) and replace it yourself with a larger model than pay Apple's exorbitant "tax" for such things.
You must be on Ballmer's payroll. It's not our fault if you're poor and can't afford a new Mac. Enjoy your crappy PC with clunky old Windows on it....
This has to be one of the most elitist replies I've ever seen on here. The guy says not everyone can afford to buy a new Mac every 3 or 4 years and this is what he gets in response.
Heck, I'm not poor, but that doesn't mean I've got nothing better to do with my money than plonk down a couple of thousand every 2-3 years for a speed bump I don't necessarily even need. $2000 buys a lot of toys or a nice vacation.
Regardless, disposable income is no reason for Apple to artificially limit the lifespan of a given product to 2-4 year lifespan. Most people that feel they 'need' to replace their computer every other year tend to be into PC gaming and we
know the Mac isn't a good choice for that. Some people should be asking themselves why they feel the need to buy a new Mac every other year. Microsoft Office bogging down? I doubt it. Even with today's inefficient/wasteful programming, there's only so much power needed to run a word processor. That Intel demonstration of Thunderbolt powering the new Final Cut Pro editing 4 1080P streams at once was impressive, but you'll need a PC to verify that BD copy since Apple won't allow BD playback (even for a Mac Pro doing Pro work).
Macs used to represent good value compared to PCs for shelf life. Most Macs that could run Puma could easily run Jaguar, Panther and Tiger as well (and many hacked to run Leopard). This kept software available and the computer useful for a long time. Users would upgrade because they needed/wanted more power, not because of planned obsolescence and that's the way it
should be. There is nothing behind planned obsolescence other than greed, IMO.
You can still buy a good PC today and it will most assuredly run new software 7-8 years from now. It'll be slower than new machines, but it will still be useful for many things and a lot of new software. I don't think the same can be said for a new Mac purchased today (unless they're booted into Windows exclusively at that time) and that is 100% due to Steve Jobs cutting off machines (i.e. planned obsolescence). It's even worse with the Mac Pro which is supposedly designed to be upgraded. But how many CPU upgrades have we seen for it in recent years? How many new GPUs support Mac Pros that are only a couple of years old? The answer sadly is not many. There's always some reason the new GPU won't work in the older machine and that's pathetic.
BTW, a fully decked out 12-core Mac Pro from Apple with 64GB of ram, two 2TB hard drives and an ATI 5870 GPU costs $10,399 ($6999 with 8GB ram). I don't care who you are; that's a
lot of money for a computer that doesn't even come with USB3 and cannot add Thunderbolt in the future period. I wouldn't expect more than one GPU upgrade to
ever be available for it either based on past observations from Apple (although many more cards would quite probably work in it under Windows).
