Jobs responds to outrage over MacBook's missing FireWire - Page 42

No idea that's just the figure apple gave!

OK, thanks Frank.


I would not be surprized... at all . From this page:

I do not think Apple would have been able to fit a CF slot in without either:
a) making the MBP bigger (especially with the 13" one), or
b) reducing the battery life (and probably increasing battery cost as it would no longer be rectangular).
And neither of these were a realistic option.

And I don't think the real reason were price savings (although I'm sure that's a bonus), the real reasons IMHO are:

a) a preparation to remove the internal optical drive in the next revision (I fully expect OSX 10.7 to be available on SD cards.)
Side note: this will definitely be proven if the next iMac revision also comes with SD card reader.
b) a further shift away from the Pro market towards 'higher-class' consumers only.
Let's face it, Apple is no longer a manufacturer with graphics professionals on their mind. Those days are gone. Apple no longer cares. If professionals need feature A and consumers feature B, B wins.
And the 'Pro' in MacBook Pro long ago stopped meaning 'professional' it means 'prosumer' now.

I don't believe any of that. It's just the regurgitated stuff we've been talking about for the past two years.

Hm, after a quick look at the SD site linked in the previous Apple page, I found this. The new cards will provide storage up to 2 TB! and transfer rates between 100 and 300 MB/s. At what price, remains to be seen. Even the current ones go up to 32 GB.

Is it one of the reasons Apple chose to go SD? Drop completely the optical storage and use instead a tiny package capable to hold much more data? Is it one of the reasons why Apple is so reluctant to adopt the Blu-ray technology?

Here's a typical response about these slots from one Pro photo web site, diglloyd.com.


I don't believe a word about 1%. Too many people I know use the Express slot.

Curious... what are they using the EC34 slot for?

How could apple know is someone uses the express slot?

Apple: Do you for any reason use the express slot?

99/100 Consumers: No.

Exactly what I did. Was gonna drop $$$s on a new MacBook but FireWire was not included (which I needed for peripherals) so bought a Canon EOS 40D instead with all the trimmings. Fantastic camera!

I'm also curious as to why an SD slot instead of CF?


Are you serious? My Canon for a start! CF is ubiquitous on the majority of semi/pro cameras. This may not be the case for consumer models but then the argument could be anyone buying a Mac with an interest in photography might be more inclined to purchase a DSLR rather than a point and shoot.

Maybe Expresscard would have been a better option if somewhat more expensive. \

I would presume from the error reports people send in automatically. These include a complete list of installed hardware - including what's in the ExpressCard slot.

And perhaps also from Genius Bar appointment statistics.

I'm sure Apple has enough of either to get the picture how many people use ExpressCards, and which ones.

One of my MacBook Pros didn't come with FW800, so I used EC to add it.

It would have been really useful for old 'Books as we migrate to the USB3 and FW3200 standards next year.

But Apple doesn't care about that, since they want you to buy a new machine anyway.

Nope, the new card spec supports storage up to 2TB. It's merely a change to the spec that doesn't impose limitations due to the FAT32 filesystem (which causes the same 32GB limit in Bootcamp). There's no way we're going to 2TB any-time soon. SDXC should be available at the end of this year in 64GB though and hopefully a price cut with it.


As Melgross points out, optical storage is still much cheaper for content delivery right now - I think their objection to Blu-Ray really is licensing and the whole DRM throughout the OS. If Apple start to use SD for software, it could catch on though.

Starting with their OS would be a great move because it should fit on just an 8GB card now and these cost £12. For Apple in bulk, it will be much cheaper and they could offer the choice with 10.6. I would personally pay up to £5 more to get Snow Leopard on an SD card.

It means much faster installs for one thing and I've really grown to hate the noise that optical drives make. Optical drives are bad by design anyway because they rely on a non-physical link between the storage medium and reader. It just bounces the laser light off the miniscule holes on the disc and needs a lot of error correction.

The only problem with Flash is price and the price of Flash has gone up due to the oversupply caused by decreased demand in this economy. If Apple come along and start buying it up in bulk for distribution, they make good partners with Flash suppliers, which helps a lot of their business.

Even just looking at the size of the optical unit inside the MBP, it's clear it has to go eventually:

http://images.macworld.com/images/le...kproinside.jpg

You could double the battery life instead. What would be nice is if they started offering this as an option - laptops with no optical unit and double the battery. Netbooks are helping push the no-optical drive setup. I hope it continues to the pojnt where we get rid of it for good. I am making a point to never buy a Blu-Ray disc and my DVD movies will go onto a hard drive.

Sooner or later, someone has to introduce movie purchases at ATM machines. Insert SD card, choose movie, insert bank card and authorize purchase. I'm not sure I'd like that though - the queues will be horrendous.

Marvin, I am saying the same thing as you about capacity. The 2 TB limit is not going to be reached soon and if I have read correctly, today the highest capacity in the market is 32 GB and of course it is still more costly than the optical solutions per GB. But even so, this storage technology seems promising for the mobile computing.

I would choose even today and SD-only equipped MBP over one with an optical drive. Noise, slowness, extra weight and high power consumption have to go one day.

Of course the capability of booting a Mac off of an SD card will have to come before optical drives are removed. That's unless a MacBook Air type solution is used but I doubt Apple wants to proliferate that kind of installation procedure any more than they have.

The new MBPs with SD slots can boot from them. You just need to reformat the card in OS X's native format and set GUID partition in Disk Utility when formatting.

Those 9.5mm BRDs are still obscenely priced. I doubt they would match the 1% for EC/34 cards at that price. Plus Apple is pushing their digital downloads. Still, Id like to at least have the HDCP option for consumers wiling to add their own drive


The OS could fit on 4GB at this point. And because you can boot off of SDHC the installer could be more intelligent than a fixed DVD image, thus making it more secure to resist cloners (though optical disc would still be needed for a few years). If the MBA gets the SD slot then i think its a certainty.

While the SHDC is considerably more expensive than an DL-DVD disc, the cost of the SDHC slot and the SDHC card are probably less than the optical drive that is included. They can ship a lot more in a smaller space and the card could potentially be reused once a new OS come out.


I can install Snow Leopard in 10 minutes from start to restart over USB. They take up a lot of space inside, have to be position where a bunch of new ports could be added, are slow to read, slower to write, prone to write errors, loud and use a lot of power. The reason to maintain this tech [in notebook computers] is dwindling, and Apple isnt one to play catch up with this kind of thing.


Larger battery, another GPU for OpenCL, more ports, another HDD and/or a thinner machine come to mind (though the HDD is still 9.5mm, the same as the optical drive, so that is not too likely. Maybe tapered back-to-front).

I think we'll get that soon, not optical and more SSD (which will be standard soon) and hopefully more ports. Although I'm doubtful on the ports. Apple seems to choose not to add more, not be limited to the number they have. My bets on we will always have the same number give or take 1.

Absolutely. I posted previously the link, but here it is again:

About the SD card slot in MacBook Pro (15-inch, 2.53GHz, Mid 2009), MacBook Pro (15-inch, Mid 2009), and MacBook Pro (13-inch, Mid 2009)


As of now, I see only two reasons for which the optical drive cannot go away: (1) price of the media; (2) official content distribution, which still heavily relies on optical disks. Otherwise, there are only disadvantages in using optical media in portable computers.

Yeah, the problem is that they drop in price more quickly and that's mainly due to the movie studios getting on board with it and ordering so many. Bulk orders, cheap manufacturing and the price drops quickly. Until SD is used as a standard distribution format, the demand is only really for the camera market.

Prices went up over the past year because of lower demand. A company with ties in the music and movie industry needs to step up and take Sony on. Music should be distributed this way too - walk into a store or up to a vending machine and insert the SD card. It's a greener option as it encourages reuse of the media. There's not a whole load of discs being sent out.

Same deal with movie rental. Instead of holding as many discs, a rental service could just be a huge drive storage with digital versions of all the movies and then when a request is made, it's put onto an SD card and posted out. Televisions would just add a slot on the side - a lot of them do already and this can be used for PVR without a massive noisy set-top box.


More ports have the limitation that they have to be soldered to the motherboard so the board has to extend from one side of the machine to the other. The older laptops had this but they had to make an oddly shaped board and fit the power supply in the middle. Still, with the optical unit gone, the motherboard could be that big and more ports added, the hard drive would just have to go at the front of the machine beside the battery like the white MB.

What I'd prefer to see is the same motherboard, HDD on one side of the board and the entire front portion used for a large thin battery that allows the machine to be thinner. Then drop the MBA as the 13" MB would be light enough (they could probably manage to get it just under 4lbs vs 3 lbs on the MBA - SSD option helps the weight) and much cheaper. Then push the 15" model down in price so that all they have is MBPs.

Agreed it is possible, but even if Apple could add several more I doubt they ever will. Its not their style to have lots of ports.

But an issue with the battery is that it almost has to be up front and running across the whole length to balance the notebook. If its off to the side or to far back it doesnt balance well, an issue some notebooks have over looked.

Agreed. He tried to solve the FW issue but gave us a FW800 port and NOT include a Fw800-to-FW400 cable, so the users have a problem as their FW400 devices needed this new cable.

It is darn hard to find this cable, hence, they solved HALF a problem. Not the whole problem.

Yeah of course, because not including a Firewire cable costing $10 is reason for a CEO to be removed from a company...

yeah really hard, you have to go to do a google search, discover you can order it from Other World Computing, order it and wait a day or two. Horrible hardship. We're becoming too, too soft, people.