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New MacBooks & MacBook Pros - Apple omitted musicians???

Yeah - getting rid of firewire was a pretty lousy omission. Hopefully it will come back when they see everyone get angry. I'm glad I bought a macbook pro this January to use with my MOTU Ultralite! First they reduce the power on the firewire port (some audio interfaces stop booting) then they have to go and take it away? We've also lost the ability to firewire target disk ubiquitously across all macs - a trick I have used to repair many a seemingly dead mac.Alas, it seems that Apple has gone up another notch in neglecting its pro users.

Although with the previous models of Macbook Pro if you connected an audio interface to the FW400 port and a HD to the FW800 port, the firewire buss, which is shared between the two ports, would drop to the lower FW400 speed!
The only way around this is to make use of the Express Card slot for probably the HD's.
I do agree that omitting the FW400 port from the Macbook is aggressive marketing from Apple in that they are 'encouraging' less well off music producers to spend more cash on the MBPro.

I had opened a thread here with my own humble swearing opinion…

If the choice for broke musicians or for videomakers is between a MBP and nothing from Apple, be sure a part of them will go windows just because their budget can't stomach the price tag. And most PCs HAVE iLink ports…

We already pay a premium for firewire for any peripheral we buy, but we do so not because we like the premium but because Firewire rocks. We have investments in firewire for a reason, plus firewire is Apple baby… It makes no sense.

"It makes no sense."

No. It makes perfect sense. Apple has a 10% market share now. Of that, maybe 1% are Pros, .01% are musicians and .001% care about Firewire. In Apple's eyes, that's nothing.

I'm not shocked at all.

With no significant price cut, the new design is just form over function!
I suggest we send Apple feedback:
http://www.apple.com/feedback/macbook.html

Bring FW400 back!

Firewire 800 is backwards compatible! All you need is a simple adapter!

http://www.amazon.com/Sonnet-FireWire-400-...4/dp/B0000CDJPQ

Guys! There is no problem here! Apple still loves you!

This post has been edited by esacasa: Thu 16 Oct 2008, 06:27

Esecasa, there's NO Firewire on the new macbooks.

Firewire 800 is theorically not an issue, but we'll have to test if all interfaces will accept the theorical backward compatibility. I have the experience with drives, even with 400 drives connected thru a 800 drive, we'll have to see for interfaces…

Okratron 5000, those few professionals (and here we talk also about musicians not necessarily pro, or even about families with DV cameras… are those who have been mostly Apple thru and thru for years. As long as I saw the point when Apple dropped the floppy, the ADB port, here I don't see the point, as they don't offer something better.

And remember, no more target…

i think apple is only focussing on making windows users switch to mac. all the rest seems to be not relevant anymore. including us, who spent alot of money for a good working firewire audio interface.
so what now?
i just left a feedback at apple.com wich seems to be the only thing, that anyone can do to make apple change there mind.

let's see what happens

Seeing how the last interface as well as the current interface I own are firewire, this is not really a move that makes me happy. It means that in 3 or 4 years I will probably be looking for a new interface as well as a computer upgrade. I just bought a MacBookPro with the FW back in September. Apparently it was a better move than I thought.

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