Apple upgrades MacBook Pro with Core 2 Duo
 

http://biz.yahoo.com/cnnm/061024/102...book.html?.v=1

http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2006...acbookpro.html

About freaking time too... Nice upgrade though. Faster DL DVD writers across the board, FW800 on the 15" 2GB RAM standard on 2.33GHz models. I felt compelled to order me a 15" 2.33GHz w/2GB 160GB HD. Should be here next week (est. Delivery of Nov 2). :)

Just in time for Xmas. I wonder if they planned it that way.

I see why they changed the name to Macbook Pro. These are portable professional DV editing machines.

Just priced on there website: $4,066.00 you can get 15 inch lap top with 3gb ram, 200 GB hard-drive, 256MB SDRAM and final cut express preintalled. Get the full FCP Suite and you just come in at around 5 grand.

That's still not cheap, I can't say I'm that excited, but it's not bad deal for a complete starter's package.

Don't ever go for that 200gb hd, it's only 4200rpm. The 160gb is the best value imo because it's higher density should make it almost as fast as the 100gb 7200rpm drive.

good catch. didn't notice 4200 rpm thing. 160 Gb is plenty. Just need enough space for a hour or two of video.

Vram
 

If you're an Aperture or FCP user, you DEFINITELY want to get the machine with the higher VRAM (256mb vs 128mb). I have this on good authority from an Aperture engineer.

And I do not believe the Apple store offers a CTO option for only upgrading the video card in the new machines.

The 160GB with it's perpendicular recording and 60% higher density is actually faster than the 100GB 7200 drive for just about every operation and benchmark with the exception of randomized seek times and only in some cases. The drive totally rocks! Well worth the $90 upgrade and the extra couple days to get it in the Macbook Pro.

Would that make the 200 gig hard drive faster than all of them?

No the fujtisu 200s aren't perpendicular, they just use more platters.

This is on Apple’s website. It claims that the 100 gig hard drive is the best for performance. I’m thinking about getting the 17inch Mac Book pro with the 100 gig 7200 RPM hard drive because of performance but you guys are confusing me.

External drives ?
 

Hey guys..since we are discussing it...

I am worried that even with the faster drive some frame drops may occur when capturing/importing HDV to it...Does anyone have experience with say a Firewire 800 external drive and capturing HDV to it ?

comments..suggestions ?


Thanks in advance

I use the La Cie Little Big Disk. A bit expensive but it's RAID 0 in small package and bus powered at that. The fastest is the 200GB which is 2 7200 100GB RAID. Barefeats tested it up to 68 MB/s on FW800. The best portable solution.

As far as I know, the data rate is exactly the same for HDV as it is for DV.

So if you can capture DV without dropping frames, you can capture HDV.

I've had no problems (i.e. no dropped frames) capturing HDV on an old eMac on Firewire 400 Lacie drives.

Here is something that will make the new MacBook Pro’s complete: A LaCie external Blu-Ray drive. http://www.cdfreaks.com/news/14197. To bad the price isn’t available yet.

That bit about the 100GB drive being the best performer has been there a while - they need to update it now the 160GB drives are available. Currently the 160GB drive is the best overall performer and highly recommended. The 100GB 7200 and the 120GB 5400 are pretty much equal with the 120GB doing better in large, data reads and continuous streaming, the 100GB drive does better with more randomized access and smaller reads/writes.

Anyway, I would recommend the 160GB drive... But if you don't want/need that much space, then either the 100 or 120 will serve you well. And which one to go with may depend on what you'll be doing. For video capture, streaming, editing, I'd take the 120 or just get the 160 - best choice there. For individual images or database work audio, or other operations that work with lots of relatively smaller files, the 100GB drive may serve a bit better. In the end, they'll all work just great for anything you throw at them and the real-world differences are very minor. If the 100 won't work, chances are the 160 won't work, which means you need an external drive system anyway.

That's the other thing with the 7200rpm 100gb and other fast-spinning drives. Seek times are very important when running striped data sets where data is interleaved between the two drives. The 100gb 7200rpm is still the king of seek times (although the 160GB 5400 is nipping at its heels), but it's enough better that it can really shine in these striped RAID configurations.

The reason why the 160 beats or performs almost as good in every test review on the internet is because it is denser. To put it simply, the computer doesn't have to go as far to get the same information because more is occupying the same space.

Here's an analogy: imagine you used to drive 14miles at 40mph to the store. Now a new store opened up 7 miles away from you and you just need to drive 40mph to get to it. AND laws have changed and you can now drive at 70mph to the store 14miles away.

Which is the fastest route?

Now remember I'm in canada so if that miles and mph stuff is off don't blame me but that should give you the general idea of how it all works. :)

True, but I have had performance problems capturing HDV to AIC - approximately 4x DV bandwidth. I was willing to trade off disk space for smoother, quicker editing with less narcoleptic 'spinning beachball of death' moments on my 1.33 GHz G4 PowerBook, but even a FW800 LaCie couldn't quite keep up - probably because attaching the Z1 to a PowerBook's 400FW bus drags everything down to 400*, and overworks the bus - what with ingest and writing to hard disk at the same time.

One day I'll get around to testing AIC ingest on my G-RAID.

* IIRC, the FW400 and FW800 ports are on the same bus - if a FW400 device is connected, the FW800 port becomes throttled to the same speed. Apple did not advocate having camcorder and capture disk on the same FW bus for some time (I think it was acknowledged from 4.5 onwards). The canonical way was to use a FW PCMCIA card for ingest, and the FW800 port for capture scratch.

OTOH, I see there's an eSATA card for the MacBook Pros allowing a cheap SATA 250GB drive (for less than an an equivalent LaCie triple) get upto 5x the performance of a FW800 drive.

I still going to wait for leopard to be finalized before I seriously think about a new machine.

A firewire PC card would probably help with that. I have never edited HDV on my 1ghz powerbook, but have done a lot of DV editing. I picked up a FW 400 PC card at Best Buy for about $20. This gave me two FW busses. You can definitely see a significant speed increase if you plug a firewire drive into each bus and copy some big files.

The FW 400 PC card could be used for your camcorder and that would free up the builtin FW 800 port for your disk.

The next MacBook Pro should have a hard drive like this.
http://www.extremetech.com/article2/...2050534,00.asp

Seeing how my new C2D Macbook Pro has the Hitachi 160GB drive in it, I'm sure Apple will be offering these once they become available in sufficeint quantity. They will almost certainly be config options with the next major revision of the Macbook Pro, which should happen July/August, if Apple continues to hold to their current update schedules.

17" Mac BookPro to arrive ...
 

on Nov. 14. I should have it up and running soon after it arrives. Lots of software to buy (ugghhh).