Welcome to our community

Be a part of something great, join today!

Log in
  • Hey all, just changed over the backend after 15 years I figured time to give it a bit of an update, its probably gonna be a bit weird for most of you and i am sure there is a few bugs to work out but it should kinda work the same as before... hopefully :)

Apple destroys MacBook Pro

B

Brook Willard

REDuser Sponsor
Joined
Dec 28, 2006
Messages
5,392
Reaction score
3
Points
38
Age
41
Location
Burbank, CA
Website
www.brookwillard.com
By lopping off the ExpressCard slot, Apple has effectively destroyed the MBP for media professionals. Think about it:

No more eSATA.
No more FW800-FW800 transfers.
Extremely limited use of products like AJA's IOHD [which requires your storage to be on a separate bus to perform properly].
No more Magma ExpressBox, so no more PCI Express cards on a laptop.
No more DuelAdapters, so no more low-cost solution to reading P2 cards [I'm sure there are other options, but I'm being dramatic, dammit!].
No more separate USB bus.

It's the apocalypse.

The 17" is the only MBP that retains the slot. The 17" is also gigantic and expensive.

Now once the Epic ships, the MBP will be dead as an on-set transfer tool anyways. Shooting 100-200MB/s footage... you need more throughput than a laptop can provide. So this isn't really about that. It's about the other thousand uses that we just lost.

Un-freakin'-believable.
 
Not surprised really.

Apple have been making moves in this direction for a while.
All they are doing in ensuring that Media Pro's only buy the top of the line systems. In my opinion, now that their base systems are more than powerful enough to edit HD, they need a way to 'force' the choice.

I'd like to think I'm wrong, but I can think of no other reason to remove the ExpressCard slot (and not offer it as an option) when they know full well how many media Pro's rely on it for RAID's etc.

my 2cents.

Brook Willard said:
By lopping off the ExpressCard slot, Apple has effectively destroyed the MBP for media professionals. Think about it:

No more eSATA.
No more FW800-FW800 transfers.
Extremely limited use of products like AJA's IOHD [which requires your storage to be on a separate bus to perform properly].
No more Magma ExpressBox, so no more PCI Express cards on a laptop.
No more DuelAdapters, so no more low-cost solution to reading P2 cards [I'm sure there are other options, but I'm being dramatic, dammit!].
No more separate USB bus.

It's the apocalypse.

The 17" is the only MBP that retains the slot. The 17" is also gigantic and expensive.

Now once the Epic ships, the MBP will be dead as an on-set transfer tool anyways. Shooting 100-200MB/s footage... you need more throughput than a laptop can provide. So this isn't really about that. It's about the other thousand uses that we just lost.

Un-freakin'-believable.
Click to expand...
 
when i saw this news today, i thought the same thing as brook.

i guess i won't be upgrading any of my dozens of laptops anytime soon. in fact, for the forseeable future, i will be buying used mac laptops.

scratching my head over this one. SD slot? WTF good is that???
 
On the plus side a 13" Macbook-pro with a FW800 port is a really great travel photography machine and the base model is pretty cheap ($1200).

It's really the 15" that's been left in the wind, but I think it has more to do with space for the new Uber-battery than any conniving on the part of apple to make Pros buy the 17".

On the same thought what is the theoretical thru-put limit of the SD card slot? maybe there is some hope of adapters there.
 
  • Thread starter
  • Moderator
  • #7
I'm just saying that if they were going to switch to a media slot for photographers on their professional laptops, the SD slot was not the right move.
 
Apple sucks. Built in batteries?

WTF are they thinking? It pissed me off when they took the FW400 ports out of the new Mac Pros, and now this?

Next update we'll have no keyboards. It will be one big giant iphone touch screen.

Jim, can you start building high tech/low cost computers next?
 
Brook Willard said:
I'm just saying that if they were going to switch to a media slot for photographers on their professional laptops, the SD slot was not the right move.
Click to expand...

Apple is a mass market consumer product company. They measure their sales in the millions. For every "media professional" buying an Apple laptop, there are probably 500 consumers with cameras who appreciate a quicker way of getting their pictures into iPhoto. That is simply Apple's business reality.
 
mmost said:
Apple is a mass market consumer product company. They measure their sales in the millions. For every "media professional" buying an Apple laptop, there are probably 500 consumers with cameras who appreciate a quicker way of getting their pictures into iPhoto. That is simply Apple's business reality.
Click to expand...

which is why they should make a super duper Macbook Pro. Macbook Ultra Pro, or whatever you want to call it.

They should make a portable PRO machine with esata, two hard drives, etc. etc. This would sell, AND drive their sales and user base of FCS, etc.
 
Or, more importantly, Jim can you start to build Windows or Linux based tools so (us Mac users included) can build onset tools with machines that are small, light and have lots of expansion capabilities without being screwed around by Apple's moronic dumbing down of their range. There's no 'i' in Pro.
 
Richard Darge said:
WTF are they thinking? It pissed me off when they took the FW400 ports out of the new Mac Pros, and now this?
Click to expand...

Why does not having FW400 ports matter? You do realize that all you need is a FW800 to FW400 cable and you are in business. $2 on ebay will get you set.

As far as batteries go... how many of you have actually bought a second battery? How many of you actually NEED a second battery? Normally, if I am editing video I have a firewire drive for the footage, so therefore I am plugged into the wall and don't need an extra battery.

Matthew
 
mmost said:
Apple is a mass market consumer product company. They measure their sales in the millions. For every "media professional" buying an Apple laptop, there are probably 500 consumers with cameras who appreciate a quicker way of getting their pictures into iPhoto. That is simply Apple's business reality.
Click to expand...

We all know Mike ... we just don't want to admit it.

We all still hold onto our FinalCutSemi-Pro, MacBookSemi-Pro and all the other Semi-Pro Apps ....
 
Brook Willard said:
I'm just saying that if they were going to switch to a media slot for photographers on their professional laptops, the SD slot was not the right move.
Click to expand...

We use SD cards in CF to SD adapters in some of our cameras at the office. Never noticed any speed issues doing this. From a speed/density perspective, there is absolutely no reason to implement CF over SD in a consumer device. SD cards require about 30 fewer pins on the socket, and no discrete connector on the cards themselves. Even Sony has come to realize that SD is going to win out over the other formats - my last Sony laptop even had an SD slot next to the Magic-whatever (sony proprietary) slot.
 
Apple just gave a giant middle-finger to a huge segment of their customer base by dropping the ExpressCard slot from the 15". I'm willing to bet $100 they drop the ExpressCard slot from the 17" with the next update. Notice that the 17" only received a couple minor upgrades, unlike the 13" and 15", just like the last time around. It will probably get the rest of its updates in a few months or with the next CPU generation.

SD card slot... I guess that's cool, but not at the expense of the ExpressCard. Apple has not yet made public the specs of the SD slot, but I'm assuming it will read SD and SDHC cards. Hopefully it will also be SDXC compliant as that is the latest spec and will support up to 300MB/s. However, there are only like 2 SDXC cards on the market at the moment and their speeds top out at a manufacturer-claimed 45~50MB/s.

Hopefully the next major update to the Macbook Pro line will rectify some of these issues or they will begin to offer us USB-3 and FireWire 3200. I'd love to see eSATA on the 17", but I know that's just wishful thinking.

I still have my 15" that's 2.5 years old and I now have no desire to part with it in favor of a new system. I was planning to upgrade to a new one (probably 17") once the quad-core mobile CPUs arrive. But if they arrive without the ExpressCard and/or other newer connectivity options, then I guess I'll just go with a PC notebook. Your loss, Apple.
 
I agree it's ridiculous that a $400 netbook PC can have an ExpressCard AND a 4-in-1 card reader but you can't get that on a MacBook "Pro"! But then I've also thought it's ridiculous you can't get a 1920x1200 screen on the 15" model either (which PCs have offered for the last 5 years)... and an eSATA port (which would make on-set transfers go much faster than FW800). I guess it's a charitable move on Apple's part to keep me solvent (by once again making me not want to buy their product?

Either that or it's a secret collusion with RED so all you Mac guys have to buy more RED media (because on-set transfers are now harder :) I agree with Jeff that USB 3 should fix most of these problems by early next year. Sucks having to buy all new devices though.

Methinks you don't want a laptop now anyway - the i7-based chips coming out at the end of this year will be much better. The current Core2 chips are:
1. old core architecture (Core 2 vs i7)
2. old process size (45nm vs 32nm)
The next chips will move ahead on BOTH of those things (ahead of desktop chips even which will still be 45nm for the quad / hexacores until 2010). So it should be a big jump. Although they'll supposedly only be dual-core. Hopefully Apple will fix the situation by then?

When they go USB 3.0 they'd better do it right and have enough independent channels or whatever to give us the bandwidth to connect the devices needed. I agree there might well be quite a painful period when we don't have any USB3.0 peripherals though.

Those Mac Pros are still the only laptop you can buy those nice laptop keyboard skins that give you colored Avid / Pro Tools editing keys though, damn it :)

For that matter... any bets on USB 3 being in end-of-this-year MacBook Pros? Or will we have to wait until next year?

Snow Leopard does look great though - nice new features (OpenCL), nice performance optimization AND they shaved 6GB from the total install size. Hope they followed the same "make everything lean and mean and work properly" ethic for the next Final Cut Studio. Very nice!

Bruce Allen
www.boacinema.com
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top