I hope they do. At the moment i really think i will need to buy the old ones or that 17 in the lineup Need it for interfaces and that. Anybody else miss it?
Actually I think that the new 17" is going to have all the good stuff. Both FW ports, at least three USB ports, the high res screen and possib a matte option.
The second Firewire port gets you nothing. The old one had both ports on the same bus, so they sucked each other's bandwidth, and using the 400 port knocked 800 one down to 400 speeds to. You are loosing absolutely nothing by using 6pin-9pin cables and daisy chaining.
In a daisy chain? Both go to 400. What else would they do? My point is, a lot of people seem to think that loosing the FW400 port cost them bandwidth, or the ability to run a 400 and 800 device at the same time, when in reality, the old machines couldn't do that either.
I'm somehow doubtful they're going to include it. They're trying to reduce as much clutter as possible and introduce a universal design.