No Blueray huh ? How 'bout no firewire ?
 

The blueray thread highlights Apples new market philosophy change-of-heart towards the independant artist types but no mention has been made of an even darker change on the horizon . The new macbooks don't even have firewire . What is Steven smoking ?

When people upgrade , they do it alittle at a time , and they expect that the new toy will know how to play with the older toys . No firewire in it's easiest to buy portable means the Apple doesn't care to cater to the creative set any longer . It's got it's eye on the corporate junkies of the world , stock traders and other evil doers !

www.kurthbousman.com

It's already discussed here (look at the second page, but the first one is also interesting):

http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/non-linea...dont-know.html

In short: no blu-ray is not nice, but it isn't nearly as bad as no firewire on the new macbooks, the loss of firewire400 on the MBP, the new displayport (it has some advantages as well, but disadvantages too), and offering the Macbook Pro only in glossy.

I have this burner (the LG one) in my old G5 tower. It works fine but I had to pry off the drive tray's front plate to fit it, and I needed to purchase an adapter to connect it. I have been using it with Toast 9.02 with the Blu-ray plug-in.

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Gary

Kurth man I'm right there with you, I got in many a battle on the appleinsider boards about and I ended up writing to apple to voice my dissatisfaction. Vote with your wallet and use the feedback form for the macbooks on apple's site to give them a piece of your mind.

Why do you really need Firewire? Capture? Print to tape? I can see Firewire is needed for a few more years, but as tapeless camcorders take over, none of us will want to deal with Firewire. Just try living with a Sony EX1 for tapeless joy, although Sony has burdened us with an incompatible MP4 format that requires a special transfer program. Yuck.

For my footage submissions, I've started to deliver on data DVD-Rs. Some editing houses seem to pay transfer houses to convert my HDV and DV tapes to something else anyway, so they may as well deal with DVD-R, which is faster and easier for me.

What if somebody already owns a DV or HDV based camera that they love and have no intention of replacing anytime soon. Sure maybe tapeless is going to be the way of the future but that doesn't change the tens of thousands of people that already have a video camera and will want to edit their material in Imovie. Maybe 5 years from now this sort of decision will make sense but I think Apple jumped the gun a little bit here. Tapeless is nice but it is far from the norm yet.

I see more television ads for Mac products than I do for Windows products. The latest Mac ad slams the Gates group for spending money on advertising instead of spending the money on fixing Vista. Gee, Mac guy, why don't you spend some money on Blu-Ray recording rights and firewire ports instead of spending so much on advertising about how Mac is so much cooler than Windows?

Well, Apple didn't remove Firewire from the new Macbooks 'in a few years', they removed it NOW. That's one of the problems.

On the other hand: there are still DV and HDV camera's being made, and many people already have them. Apple expecting them to all just throw it away or replace it, is insane. Apple used to be about making multimedia on your computer, they always highlighted that. How do you do that if you can't even import your images?

But then there are also:
- Musicians... Many musicians worked with normal Macbooks, because these have enough process power, and are very small to take on a stage. But many external audio interfaces, and pro audio interfaces... only work with Firewire400. Oops.
- All those Firewire 400 Hard drives... USB can't compete with Firewire400, and although USB2 is more used by consumers, Firewire400 is also a big norm in the market.

There literally is no excuse for Apple to take away the Firewire on the MAcbook's, exept for pushing people to shell out the money for a Macbook Pro.
I'm a big fan of Apple's software, and I really think they have many fantastic products, but in the life of me, I can't defend any of the decissions they made in these new laptop upgrades.

And don't get us started about the new über glossy shiny screens, without an option for matte, even on the Macbook Pro's...

Anyhow, this is already being discussed in another thread to which I pointed above, so.

I've been in the mothervoard chipset business, and Firewire hasn't seen much support. More customers ask for USB connectors, so you can see that chipset manufacturers will drop a licensed hardware block to make their chips more competitive in price. When there are fewer chipsets to choose from, you can understand a manufacturer (Apple) choosing on the basis of performance, power usage, area. The fact is that very few computer users connect anything to their Firewire ports yet commonly use their USB ports for Printers and Flash memory dongles.

I'm sorry that the MacBooks have lost the Firewire port. All is not lost. You can buy an adapter that will give you more. How about Firewire capture to an external Firewire disk? With an ExpressCard slot and $70, you can add more ports:

Belkin 2-Port SATA II ExpressCard
FRYS.com*|*belkin

Sonnet Firewire + USB2
Sonnet - FireWire/USB ExpressCard/34: FireWire + USB 2.0

Belkin USB 2.0 and FireWire ExpressCard
FRYS.com*|*Belkin

Gints, you would be right and I think there wouldn't be any complaints about firewire IF the Macbook had an Expresscard slot. Unfortunately, it doesn't. You'd better forget about working with video or music editing on the new Macbooks because they have zero expansion capability.

What bugs me is that "Get a Mac, any Mac." used to be the simple, foolproof advice to give to anyone who needed a computer that could handle nearly everything. Give a pre-Aluminum Macbook to a college kid and you could be sure that no matter where his interests ventured, the Macbook could handle it (well except for the latest PC games). Now, it's a lot harder for me to recommend "any Mac" as a solution for everything. If you have to qualify the statement with "Get a Mac, except for the new Macbooks if you want to work with music or video, in which case you either have to pay a lot more or get a PC notebook with firewire," then it isn't nearly as simple or foolproof as it used to be.

Apple basically built the consumer Mac brand around the ubiquity of creative editing abilities. When it was hard to find a PC that could do video editing, music, DVD writing, etc. you knew you could count on Mac to support all the latest buzzwords. I don't understand how Apple were able to justify to themselves the crippling of the Macbook to little more than basic $300 netbook tasks.

But the new Mac Book Pro have Firewire 800.
I´ll go for the Pro model.





...

I've seen some newer consumer style video cameras that have also dropped the FW port in favor of USB transfer.

As we move away from the tape medium towards file based video, FW is no longer a necessity for sustaining high data rates. I could easily shoot with the Sony EX, remove the card and plug it into Sony's EX card reader which has? Yup, you guessed it... a USB interface. Or let's take it a notch further. The EX-30 deck, which retails for around 6K attaches with... that's right, a USB cable.

Firewire has been a great interface, but it's getting supplanted with newer and faster interface standards. E-SATA is going to outperform an external FW drive, hands down. Wouldn't it be nice if cameras started showing up with SATA ports on them for the file transfer? Some higher end cameras already offer ethernet based video transfer. But those are not streaming AV, they are file based.

-gb-

For example, all AVCHD format camcorders, from Sony, Panasonic, Canon and JVC.

It's already "later", Blu-ray discs are available in bulk for under $7 each, and I know someone who bought a Blu-ray burner on sale for around $150. The licensing fees can't be too bad given that some authoring programs selling for under $100 support Blu-ray.

Apple has become the Microsoft of media distribution, and is doing everything they can to resist competitive solutions.