G5 verses MacBookPro shootout (You are not going to believe this!)

[Gary Taylor]

Hi George,
That is good news about the upcoming cards. The MBP is looking better and better.

I disagree with your assertion that FW800 will not be missed. Until Apple starts to ship the MBP with something like FW800 or eSATA, pro users will have to sacrifice that single precious ExpressCard for storage instead for some cool video card that AJA or BlackMagic might come up with later.

The MBP looks to be a cool system but I for one am going to wait to see that the expected 17 inch model offers. In addition to higher resolution I am really hoping it offers FW800.
Gary

[George Loch]

[Gary Taylor] “I disagree with your assertion that FW800 will not be missed. Until Apple starts to ship the MBP with something like FW800 or eSATA, pro users will have to sacrifice that single precious ExpressCard for storage instead for some cool video card that AJA or BlackMagic might come up with later.”

My assertion is that FW800 never really took hold in the first place compared to other standards. You still have a hard time finding a good assortment of FW800-based solutions. SATA is going to be a lot more useful and is already more available than FW800. I just built another PC workstation that had external SATA ports availability built into the MB. I ahve built many such computers and have yet to see FW800 included.

[Gary Taylor] “The MBP looks to be a cool system but I for one am going to wait to see that the expected 17 inch model offers. In addition to higher resolution I am really hoping it offers FW800.”

I would not hold my breath for AJA or BMD to come forward with something. They already know the major limitation of the MBP and is the very thing you mentioned – no way to get high speed storage and HD. HDV would work of course but, that is the extent of it.

Keep in mind that Apple did not deliberately ‘leave off’ FW800. They based their design off of Intel reference and Intel does not include FW800 in the specs of any of their motherboards. The fact is, FW800 is relagated to an very vertical users base and will not make it back onto the Apple platform except through third party h/w developers. What I would NOT be suprised to see are external SATA ports on the Intel-based desktops. That could be easily done and would make a lot of sense.

-gl