New Imac, MacBook Pro from Macworld

[Bob Cole]

[Tom Wolsky] “No pro apps will run on the Intel machines until their running universal in March.”

But then, will the new portable, bolstered by external FW drives, be a good choice for FCP editing DV? With a PCMCIA card, can you get FW800 with the new laptop?

I have a bunch of questions that are probably unanwerable. But anyway:

Compare the two Pro’s for FCP editing SD/DV. With 2 GB of RAM and the 120 GB hard drive, the 1.67 Pro will be $2700, and the 1.83 will be $2900.

Is the upgrade charge $49 for FCP Studio or $49 for each title inside Studio (DVDSP, FCP, Soundtrack, Motion2)?

How is Apple historically with delivering in-demand machines, which the Pro will undoubtedly be, on any kind of schedule?

Glad I waited,
— Bob C.

[Gunleik Groven]

[Bob Cole] “How is Apple historically with delivering in-demand machines, which the Pro will undoubtedly be, on any kind of schedule?”

First off machines: Pretty damned very bad.
(Anyone remember B&W G3, G4 or G5?)

It’s promising, though that the new iMac has a deliverydate “today”. The machines are actueally in production. Hooray!

I have twice bought the “first of a new generation” and none of them were up to speed before a considerable time due to delivery and SW/HW issues. I have loved them both, though.

But Apple seem to have learned from the iPod launchings. Delivery dates have been set and met. So one can hope.

Gunleik

[Ed Dooley]

They don’t have FW800 *but* they have Express Card 34! Theoretically they run at 250MB/s compared to Cardbus’ 133MB/s.
There are a number of manufacturers ramping up production, so there’ll be a host of FW400/800 and SIIG announced port-
multiplying, NCQ SATAII cards. The increase in throughput speed compared to FW800 should be impressive. So, if you have
a bunch of ATA drives in FW cases you still need to use, get the XCard 34 with FW; for much better performance (we’re talking
4 drive SATAII RAIDS plugged in to your laptop here) get the card with SATA.
Ed

[Nick Westbridge]

I just recently purchased a new dual-core 2.0ghz G5 (yes I was aware of the impending Intel releases, but I’m more than happy with the machine I have now). I know there are obviously no benchmarks yet, but would it stand to reason that a new Intel iMac with dual-core chips might be as fast or faster than the behemoth I just bought and paid almost twice the price for? I certainly wouldn’t regret the unit I just got, however I’m thinking more in to the future, if I were looking to get a secondary machine. Once the pro apps go native in March, might this be the case?

[Gary Taylor]

Even there I would like to see a model with more than one ExpressCard slot. I hope they release models with FW800 and two ExpressCard slots. FW800 is great because you don’t have to buy a card to make it work well. I’ll bet it wouldn’t cost them more than 50 bucks to add it and that would save us a couple of hundred.
Gary

[George Loch]

[Nick Westbridge] ” I know there are obviously no benchmarks yet, but would it stand to reason that a new Intel iMac with dual-core chips might be as fast or faster than the behemoth I just bought and paid almost twice the price for?”

My guess based on the tests that have been done on the Intel dual-cores is that it will be at least as fast as a dual G5. With the specs the MBP has it will most likely be a bit faster than a 2.0 dual.

-gl

[Jee Hoon lee]

The fact that, although the MacBook is available in two price points, it’s not filling the traditional 3 part product tier of the past (each line had 3 flavors). Of course, they may have decided to not do that anymore, but I think it’s unlikely. I’d speculate that a 12 or 14″ unit plus a higher end model with loaded features will be out in a few months after they see how this initial offering fares. Hope they keep a 17″ in the pipeline, though I don’t know how well the old one did in the marketplace.

Just this guy, Y’know?

[Sean Oneil]

[Gary Taylor] “It looks like a great machine but it apparently doesn’t have Firewire 800. I wonder why Apple would drop that as a feature?”

Because it’d be pointless. I think FW800 a dead format. It was non-existant on the Windows side, and the only FW800 products anyone ever bought were video editors like us. The MacBook comes w/ a CardBus slot, so if you really wanted to, you could add a FW800 card. Or, you’d add something much better like a SATA card, which is why they’ve probably given up on FW800.

Sean