New MacBooks & MacBook Pros - Apple omitted musicians???
| Wednesday October 15, 2008. 01:24 PM | Apple > Apple |
Great news from Apple! Steve Jobs revealed the new awaited MacBooks & MacBook Pros at yesterday's live KeyNote. How cool...
That would have been of great interest to our community if a "minor" detail haven't caught our attention... Apple simply decided to remove the firewire interface from the MacBooks leaving this option to the MacBook Pros family only (with a single firewire 800 connector). WOW, isn't that incredible coming from the company that first introduced the firewire IEEE 1394 protocol in personal computers?
In short, that means that any nomad musician will from now on have to spend at least $1999 to connect a firewire interface and/or hard drive to an Apple laptop... Isn't that cool? Ooops, my mistake... There is an option from the Apple website. The 13-inch White MacBook is still alive with it's cheap GMA X3100 graphic card. I don't now what's "new" there but it is presented as so... Well at least it has a firewire 400 connector and costs "only" $999. For that price, I'm sure the "black" model with the 2.4 GHz intel Core Duo processor would have generated a little more interest to our community... Yes the "black" MacBook does look better in the studio or on stage!
- The new MacBook Pro : If we were hard gammers, I think we'd all love the new MacBook Pro but that isn't the case for the MacMusic community that's been supporting Apple products for so long. The only thing new on the MacBook Pros is a faster graphic card and glossy glass screen that makes everything you see "flat-out spectacular" as they say. Well that sure isn't an improvement for photographs and video professionals that don't exactly expect anything "spectacular" out of their monitor.
When it comes to using the new MacBook Pro in the studio, well again we loose from the previous versions that had two very useful firewire interfaces. Their was one 6 pin firewire 400 connector usually used to connect a firewire audio interface and a 9 pin firewire 800 interface connected the hard drive which was great but now what? Well the only option is to buy and expensive firewire 800 hub (if you can find one) and connect both the firewire 400 interface and the drive to the hub which will surely bring down the overall speed to a firewire 400 Mb/S interface... Thanks Mr Apple for the great improvements.
My last thought goes to the audio manufacturers like Apogee, MOTU, RME, etc that built great firewire interfaces following Apple's recommendations. Think of Apogee that partnered with Apple to create a native firewire interface presented as the perfect match for Logic and particularly Logic Express users... I"m sure they just loved watching yesterdays KeyNote announcements that make their products obsolete to new MacBook owners... Thanks for your investment Mr Apogee but bye-bye...
With the loss of firewire interfaces on MacBook, I really wonder how we're going to persuade young and fortune-less PC users to "switch" to Apple laptops if it is to play the "Air Guitar"...
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