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Thanks for clearing that up; I didn't realise the ExpressCard was so trouble-free.

There is an ExpressCard version of UAD-1, but the one for UAD-2 will slightly lag the new PCI boards.

mhschmieder wrote:Thanks for clearing that up; I didn't realise the ExpressCard was so trouble-free.

There is an ExpressCard version of UAD-1, but the one for UAD-2 will slightly lag the new PCI boards.

You're welcome. Yes, it's pretty much plug and pray, I mean plug and play The only challenge I've had is with
the card physically being able to pop out too easy. It may just my the card I have or the card slot in my MacBook Pro.
I'm just real careful to not pull on it when it's in use.

I didn't know there was an ExpressCard version of the UAD-1. That's amazing.

Since my 2007 MacBook Pro (2.16Ghz Intel) seems to run DP 6.01 nearly as fast as my G5 2.5 Ghz Quad processor PowerPC Mac, I'm really
considering staying with Laptops. The new Apple 24' monitor has a built in MagSafe AC adapter for the MacBook (Pro) so it looks like they're
also seeing a time when you could have just a MacBook Pro and big monitor at home

fwiw-- here's Steve Jobs' response to the fw issue:

http://www.edibleapple.com/steve-jobs-e ... -macbooks/

Another point of view is simply that Apple didn’t leave Firewire by choice, but rather, and as Steve Jobs pointed out, the market left Firewire for USB 2.

And if every F#@$ing PC on the planet jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge, would a Mac have to as well?......I guess we have our answer.

I pity the fool that has to use a USB2 drive for large external storage. I get less than half the transfer speed on my rig with USB2 compared to FW.

Mr_Clifford wrote:...off the Brooklyn Bridge....

Coming from an Australian, that is ultra-profound! I can't disagree, though.

You know, I was really only being facetious when I smirked about USB-- but then I saw this article and it really made me scratch my head.

I don't mind that the lower-end models are being trimmed for savings. Apple's hardware was priced high anyway-- but with the understanding that many a/v people have used the more affordable laptops to do certain things with fw400-- which has become an affordable standard whether Jobs likes it or not-- means major changes in the way people work-- and perhaps will buy Apple products from here on.

I'm staying with towers for production, myself-- unless fw will disappear from those!

Frodo wrote:I'm staying with towers for production, myself-- unless fw will disappear from those!

Why would it not?

- c

beautypill wrote:

Frodo wrote:I'm staying with towers for production, myself-- unless fw will disappear from those!

Why would it not?

- c

I suppose the only real surprise would be no surprise at all.

Another thing I just ran across was the news that Apple is holding off on BluRay integration due to licensing costs of $30 per machine. Jobs calls BluRay "a bag of hurt".

Thanks for that link Frodo. I love this comment from Kyle:

“I hate it just as much as the next person — however, Steve hardly steers us wrong. The problem is, is that Steve is about 5 years ahead of all of us, and knows the future. Apparently, Firewire isn’t in it.”

In that case, remove Firewire IN 5 YEARS TIME!

Frodo wrote:Another thing I just ran across was the news that Apple is holding off on BluRay integration due to licensing costs of $30 per machine. Jobs calls BluRay "a bag of hurt".

Ha, well he might well call it that but he’ll have no choice but to add BluRay players eventually since they have now become “the standard.”

tyronehowe wrote: Ha, well he might well call it that but he’ll have no choice but to add BluRay players eventually since they have now become “the standard.”

Good to see you peeking in, Ty!!

Dunno what the Steve-ster is up to these days. If he knows the future, he'll either take us all with him or he'll leave us al behind!

Frodo wrote:

Mr_Clifford wrote:...off the Brooklyn Bridge....

Coming from an Australian, that is ultra-profound! I can't disagree, though.

I would have said the Sydney Harbour Bridge, but I thought I'd better translate into Americanese for the benefit of most of my Unicorn brethren.

Mr_Clifford wrote: And if every F#@$ing PC on the planet jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge, would a Mac have to as well?......I guess we have our answer.

I pity the fool that has to use a USB2 drive for large external storage. I get less than half the transfer speed on my rig with USB2 compared to FW.

I'm all pro FW but eSATA is currently more effective for external storage. Even FW1600 will not change that. The perspectives of FW3200 are especially dim at this point.

Frodo wrote:Good to see you peeking in, Ty!!

Hi Frodo! Well I’ve got to see what you all guys are up to!

Frodo wrote:Dunno what the Steve-ster is up to these days. If he knows the future, he'll either take us all with him or he'll leave us al behind!

Well I guess the proof will be in the sales. I imagine that most people won’t be so bummed about the lack of FW port as we are. If it really is “college kids” that buy the MacBook, they won’t care. But in the UK, I don’t think that many students take MacBooks to College / Uni with them. Not when a PC Laptop is less than half the price.

A totally craptastic "upgrade"... really negligible. Not to say that they won't actually upgrade things in the future, but this ain't it.

I wouldn't say this moved us "closer" to anything.

Frodo wrote:

Mr_Clifford wrote:...off the Brooklyn Bridge....

Coming from an Australian, that is ultra-profound! I can't disagree, though.

Well, we have our Brooklyn Bridge here in Oz - sorta.

This bridge was built by the same company that built the Brooklyn Bridge in Manhattan, and the company gave its name* to a lovely little town on the Hawkesbury River north of Sydney where I spent two mysterious years of my life.

*Tho this story gives a different account of the naming of the town, I'm pretty confident of the USA-Brooklyn-Oz link.

Whether you like it or not, the industry IS moving away from Firewire. How do I know this? I am a chip designer and I have had the opportunity not only to work on dedicated processing chips for a camcorder, I was also able to ask the project management team of the other company why they only had USB implemented in their design and not FireWire. The response I got was due to a few reasons, one, FireWire is not cheap. There are licensing fees, along with the cost of the actual hardware implementation. The design data is very expensive, and, definitely pushes up the cost of the core significantly. If you were to add additional chipsets to the design, this cost even gets worse. They told me that beyond the these costs alone, their investors did not want to include FireWire. The average user in their opinion and in their studies do not need FireWire. I did not do these tests, I did not see the numbers, so I cannot argue. However, I believe them. Most users use USB no matter how horrible it is for the most part.

A quick look at a lot of the top camcorders being sold and you will very clearly see that all of them include USB, and not all of them include FireWire.

You will get no argument out of me whom I think is superior, as I use FireWire for my 2 896HDs and my variety of hard drives. That said, I have used a wide variety of USB2 drives on a few projects recently and they worked smoothly. I streamed both video and audio off of them and saw no degradation in performance.

The issue here over anything else is that if someone was using a MacBook before and wanted to upgrade, their upgrade path is to a MacBook Pro now.

Personally, I could care less. If you are working fine with a MacBook now, don't upgrade. Stay with what you have. The fact that Apple prices have not sky-rocketed up with the expanded cost of fuel and materials, I think they are doing what they can at each level to keep a product attainable. That of course is a personal feeling and based on no facts.

Also, the express port created a new bus as described. If you are not seeing two FW busses in your machine, something is seriously not showing up right. The express port is essentially just another type of connector to get external circuitry to the PCI bus of the laptop. Pretty cool if you ask me.

The 17 inch mac books have not changed, other than the drive configurations and RAM, I think we have another 3 months before we see a new update to that.

What I am excited about is OpenCL and the new dual graphics chips. Snow Leopard will have some OpenCL support which means programs can use your extra video card if you are not using it for doing CPU work. VERY cool.

I plan on upgrading my 17 inch when the new 17 inches come out as long as they have a 3Ghz version. If not, I might just wait.