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No FireWire in MacBooks

Just throwing my two cents in:

I'm a college student.
Have been looking to switch from my old HP laptop to a MacBook for quite a while now.

Hearing the first bubbling rumors of the expected MacBook refresh this year I got myself a credit card and patiently waited a few months for a nice new mac to use for my mobile audio recording and live performance with my Echo audiofire interface.

No firewire?
Totally absurd.

There's no way I would buy this laptop now.
And there's no way I could reasonably afford a MacBook Pro.

Also- it seems like they've dramatically reduced the Educational Discount on all laptops to only $50. Didn't it used to be something like 200??
 
ntrigue said:
Macbook has Ethernet. Firewire 800 has an Ethernet converter. Cease b*tching.
Click to expand...

Bullsh*t. What exists is a SPECIFICATION for FireWire using an ethernet connector. There's no chip that supports it.
 
andrewdale said:
I mean, we do realize that technically USB 2.0 is faster than FW400, right?
Click to expand...

Not in the real world. Plus, the USB bus is often shared with a bunch of other peripherals, whereas the FW is often isolated. I can tell you that transferring files over FW is a heck of lot faster than over my USB drives.
 
Yea, I think Apple really ****ed this upgrade all up. So to recap, they made a fancy new aluminum body, added a faster graphics chip, and then kept everything else the exact same or ******** - and they RAISED THE ****ING PRICE?!

No Firewire is a HUGE MISTEP. There are too many people (ie - all the semi pro users who swear by apple and spread the word for the company) who use Firewire peripherals for it not to be included!

I hate to say it, but I bet Apple is gonna be FEELING this mistake soon. This is the first time Apple has actually made me kinda angry:mad:
 
Chris Blount said:
No firewire is a deal killer...period. Sometimes I use my white Macbook to capture HD video from my Sony DV cam. Guess I won't be "upgrading".
Click to expand...

What is wrong with your macbook now?

If nothing, why are you complaining?
 
Queso said:
Flash RAM is where camcorders are going. FireWire is needed for tape transfers (the old tech), everything else works fine with USB. Apple are skating where the puck is going to be again.
Click to expand...

The problem is the puck is going to take a long time to get there.

One miniDV tape costs $3 and can store an hour of DV video. When you transfer that to your computer via Firewire, it takes up 13 gigs of disk space. 3.6 megs/second of video.

You can't buy 16 gig flash cards yet for remotely close to $3. The solution might be to record with higher compression settings, like many existing flash based cameras do, but you sacrifice the picture quality or editability of DV (e.g. difficult to do precise editing on MPEG2 compressed video). Or use the USB port on your camera and transfer video at a lower quality (in many cases at one QUARTER of the full resolution of DV video). That's a step backwards, not forwards!

Let's say it again: DV cameras require Firewire connections. You cannot transfer DV video over USB.

As to the person who asks why you're using a MacBook if you're editing lots of tape-based video: why not? I started editing DV video with a 400 Mhz Celeron PC, and it worked just fine back in 2001. Is it not reasonable to expect a new computer in 2008 to do the same? And isn't Apple's philosophy, isn't the whole point of iLife, is that everything is easy to do, you just turn it on and go, plug and play? No adaptors, upgrades, nothing missing, everything's supposed to be included.

Can you imagine if the iMacs of 10 years ago didn't include Ethernet ports for internet access? "Oh, that's a PRO feature... if you're using the internet a lot, you really should be buying a Power Mac"...
 
Still trying to figure out how the migration assistant will work. I loved that feature. Made upgrading a no brainer.

Kenal0
 
NT1440 said:
What is wrong with your macbook now?

If nothing, why are you complaining?
Click to expand...
Nothing is wrong with my macbook ESPECIALLY now. My only complaint about the now older Macbooks was the display which is why I was sorting waiting to see what Apple was going to do.

No biggy. My current trusy Macbook will continue to plug away. :)
 
notjustjay said:
*snipped*

Can you imagine if the iMacs of 10 years ago didn't include Ethernet ports for internet access? "Oh, that's a PRO feature... if you're using the internet a lot, you really should be buying a Power Mac"...
Click to expand...

Brilliant post. What disappoints me is Apple would have discussed that, and why the hell they went against it really irritates me.

Maybe they should start to realise that they can no longer define the MacBook Pro as a Pro laptop - they should just combine the two and offer 13" and 15" models, varying specs. But heck, FireWire should have been on every single model.
 
I didnt even think about the lack of target disk mode.

A lot of the time, when I write/record a session (audio) that I know I will edit on the move or take to another studio, I will use my MB in target disk mode as an external disk. This will totally screw me on this one.

I will have to either transfer over network (which I find slow and buggy) or transfer to an external USB then back to the portable.

I miss target disk mode already!
 
Every new product they come out with gets farther and farther from anything I'd want. I really, really want to stick with OS X, but I just cannot justify spending say $1300 on a Macbook when it doesn't have the features I need when I could go spend $700 on an HP or Compaq or Dell and not have features I need at half the price. I'm not made of money, and I would prefer the smaller size of the MacBook to the Pro, but hey, if they don't want my money, I will take it elsewhere I suppose.


Any why did they have to make them so ugly? I was so disappointed when they did this to the iMacs, but wow, the MBs, and MBPs? Looks alone won't stop me from buying a computer, but they would definitely make me embarrassed to be seen the the thing. At least with the iMacs, you can keep the ugly thing at home. They've already given us crappy screens in the 20" (the size I'd want) iMac, but if they drop FireWire in it before I can afford one, too...well, I guess I'll see how long I can go without owning a computer period. :(
 
Jpoon said:
Meh, it's just like the non-inclusion of Blu-Ray.

They figure the majority doesn't use it on MacBook, or at all for that matter.
The minority always gets screwed by the majority.
Click to expand...

That's called democracy...

But then again weren't we always the ones protecting Apple when it came to offering choice? ;)

Our own mistake. I for one won't buy a laptop with a glossy screen.
 
To the people that say no big deal, use an adapter (either to usb or ethernet): LINK TO ONE!

You know why they don't link to them? Because they don't exist.

I have no problem with Apple eliminating a feature that may not be used by most users. I do have a problem with the lack of bridge or add on solution that we could pay for.

Like a poster above said, this would be like Apple dropping modems from the laptops and not providing the USB modem and no 3rd Party USB modems exist. I think that would have been a problem.
 
firebox said:
(Correct Thread this time!)
I support a school that uses 30+ Macbooks for a range of things including iMovie...
Click to expand...

... and I guess you also use netinstall to image those machines. Say goodbye to creating the netboot image over target disk mode. In fact - how will we create a netboot image?

I guess we will have to create the master image and booted image on a different partition on the same machine, and write the image to another partition on that machine.

Well done Apple, you've gone all Vista!
 
sine-nomine said:
Every new product they come out with gets farther and farther from anything I'd want. I really, really want to stick with OS X, but I just cannot justify spending say $1300 on a Macbook when it doesn't have the features I need when I could go spend $700 on an HP or Compaq or Dell and not have features I need at half the price. I'm not made of money, and I would prefer the smaller size of the MacBook to the Pro, but hey, if they don't want my money, I will take it elsewhere I suppose.


Any why did they have to make them so ugly? I was so disappointed when they did this to the iMacs, but wow, the MBs, and MBPs? Looks alone won't stop me from buying a computer, but they would definitely make me embarrassed to be seen the the thing. At least with the iMacs, you can keep the ugly thing at home. They've already given us crappy screens in the 20" (the size I'd want) iMac, but if they drop FireWire in it before I can afford one, too...well, I guess I'll see how long I can go without owning a computer period. :(
Click to expand...

Have you used Vista? I think not owning a computer is a better solution.

Kenal0
 
Doesn't bother me, since I've got an HD hard disk-based Sony that goes over USB2 anyway. Would have been nice to have an extra USB port though.
 
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