My favorite Mac line up was the iBooks and the PowerBook 12,” 15,” and “17″ – it was very clear to the customer the difference between the two lines, and there was a reasonable transition in price points from the top of the line iBook and the PowerBook 12.”

While i understand Apple’s omission (I agree that white/blk MacBooks were too close in feature sets to the previous MacBook Pros shipping at the same time which could have cannibalized their higher end sales), however I think they missed a critical product offering. In revamping their lineup to differentiate the two lap top lines they neglected to introduce a mid range product that briges the two. The MacBook Airs fit that middle range price point but offer little in terms of filling voids between the MBP and MB lines. There are two things Apple could have done to alleviate the sting for many prospective Mac customers
1) Added a ExpressCard port to the MacBooks to address some of the omissions such as firewire. While adding the slot would have added to the cost, it would have given MacBook purchasers some piece of mind and the option to add firewire if required. I bet however it would have cost a lot more to add a slot than to just add firewire. So this might not have been practical.
2) To preserve form factor they could have offer an optional MacBook with one USB and one firewire port. This would have been a lot less painful, in that there are many low cost portable hubs available which makes the reduction in ports less of an issue. They could have perhaps offered this as a build-to-order option from the Apple Store.
3) My favorite option would be if Apple introduced a 12 or 13 inch MacBook Pro. This would be priced right where the MacBook Air sits $1499-1799 but include all the key features of the Pro line.

I’m also noticing that although Apple has standardized on Intel based technologies, they are a lot slower than the industry in keeping pace in refreshes on competitive system configurations. Most PC laptops for less money (say $600 to 1000) offer 4GB RAM with option to upgradable to 8GB, and 250GB-300GB – and some priced the higher end of that range are offering BlueRay readers/DVDburners. We are used to paying slightly higher premiums for Mac products but with all their cost cutting they are still keeping their products at the same price points but offering much less – making the premiums less merited. For example Apple used include a number of Video adapters (DVI and Analog) with the PowerBooks and also used to include Apple Remote controls. Now they don’t even include the remotes on the more expensive Pro line and everyone has to buy video adapters to support their new video ports. We used to feel somewhat rewarded for paying the premium for Apple products, other than enviro-friendly unibody construction I there is less of a reward currently. I don’t think Apple would ever come out with a sub-$800 laptop to compete with cheaper PCs but if we are going to pay higher premiums then I would hope to feel a bit more rewarded especially in light of the current economy (more standard RAM, blueray/dvd burner, bigger hard drives, include a DVI adapter, etc)

I have a number of professional audio products (each costing above $1000) which require firewire. I love my PowerBook 12″ it was just the right size but had a nice feature set that fit my needs. I was looking to upgrade but now my only option is the 15MBP which is fine except that 1) it is a much steeper jump than I was hoping to pay so it stings a little more 2) I would prefer the smaller footprint and weight of a 12 or 13″ laptop. Personally I feel the MacBook Air is niche product which is wasting that valuable mid-range product space Apple is missing in a time. A new lower cost, smaller MacBook Pro or a higher priced MacBook would have filled things in nicely and given customers less of a hard compromise.

One of the reasons i moved to Mac was the elegant and profesional feel in on the mate screen and the hole different world that is the MBP from a PC, now it seems to me that Apple its miking money for an expencieve PC lookalike lap top.

Sorry, you are wrong. Booting from USB has been supported since the first Intel Mac. I was a Mac Genius then and I have done it hundreds of times since. You simply need to partition your drive using the GUID partition scheme, rather than the (very)old Apple Partition scheme. It’s one extra step in Disk Utility when you set up your drive, and it will wipe the drive (but if the drive is a cloned backup then this is minor) but it typically takes 20 seconds. really, 20 seconds. This has been noted and discussed ad-nauseum on the Internet for 2 years now. If you need a solution, take the initiative to look for it. Because we are used to a certain way of doing things does not obviate the need for us to grow and learn with the times. Citation from Apple http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1948

Having said that, I will miss Target Disk Mode. I will have to pull some drives out of their old FW enclosures and put them into USB enclosures, but I can usually find reliable ones on geeks.com for less than $20. I would be happy to make that trade for the new macbook over my first gen, but my next Apple portable will have the 15inch screen I have been wanting and denying myself for the last 7 years.

Incidentally, my 2 year old 2.0Ghz CoreDuo first gen black macbook is still more than capable for most tasks I do, so I don’t have to upgrade anyway. What a novel idea!

cheers!

I am lucky enough to still be using my current MB 2.4 with its firewire intact. However my kid is not so happy as the hand-me-down she thought was getting very soon won’t happen for a while now. I use Pro-Tools with a digidesign FW audio box and I capture live video from a Canon XL1 into Final Cut Pro to the MB 2.4 and Windows…..never gonna happen ;-)

Thanks for the response!

So what will you do? I mean that seriously.

- If you buy nothing then you will still not have the “shiny one”, and yet presumably your current machine is not up to the task or you wouldn’t be looking to buy a new one in the first place.

- What about a refurb? The top-end Black MacBook of only nine days ago was $1,499 and is now available for $1,099. Will you get that (though I realize it’s not the shiny one either)? It’s a heck of a deal.

- Or maybe a refurb or clearance sale MacBook Pro? A little more than $1,299 but a better machine overall, and in an aluminum case as well. Though it’s bigger and heavier.

- Get a Dell (or HP, Acer, etc.)? Heck, you might even spend a little less, but then what software will you use? Adobe Premiere Elements? Adobe Photoshop Elements? Nice software but there’s another $150 or more right there. And of course there’s the headaches of Windows.

I am really (and sincerely) curious as to what your next step will be.

This IMHO is the worst decisions that Apple have probably ever made regarding a product refresh – or maybe the 2001 G4/400 with no audio input.

It has certainly cost them £1,149.00 of my british pounds today.

Firewire isn’t just about FCP and drives you know. It’s also about music.

Now I’m going to admit that I’m an amateur musician, not a professional and I need Firewire. I need it so that I can run a low latency multi-channel audio interface. USB2 is just not able to run these with any level of reliability.

When I switched from a PC I didn’t have any Firewire peripherals but I bought my audio interface (a piece of kit aimed at amateurs not professionals) because USB couldn’t cut it and there’s no express card slot on the MacBook. All the reviews of USB sound cards I’ve read have pointed out there limited spec and poor reliability related to USB’s through put problems.

We’ve all got to start somewhere and I’d like to know where those who look down on our “tedious” home videos and music expect us to start if not with the laptop we already saved up for. You shouldn’t have be a jobbing professional to use Garage Band, surely.

But if you think back to a statistic that Apple has been repeating: “over 50% are first time Mac buyers”, it makes some sense. They are not making the MacBook for people like me. A huge percentage of these 50% are not nearly as familiar with FireWire as long time Mac users are.

It seems that their research that supports the move . . . but I’m still pissed. I could have lived with the performance of a MacBook, but now I’ll have to either buy an older MacBook. Or a MacBook Pro . . . and that will be a harder sell.

Blogs would be full of “professionals” who swear that no *real* pros uses FireWire anymore and why did they leave that stupid FireWire port when a second USB is what people *really* want.

It seems to me that Apple made a regrettable, but rational decision and I have yet to hear anyone with a really rational argument from the group that disagrees. It’s all just some variation on “I’m a Pro (even though they don’t use Pro equipment), and I need it.”

It’s patently obvious that more people will have use for the second USB than those that will miss the FireWire since almost all peripherals are USB. So Apple should have decided to screw a much larger group of folks, so this much smaller group would be happy? This makes sense to anyone?

Apple say the Final Cut Studio suite is not supported on the Macbook, but they are being rather disingenuous. Final Cut Pro performs fine as it doesn’t use the GPU extensively.

See http://www.scottsimmons.tv/blog/2006/06/15/my-day-editing-with-final-cut-pro-on-a-macbook-and-not-the-pro-one/

Motion and Color are very slow as the do use the GPU, but for mobile editing, FCP is the only application needed, along with a Firewire port.

Apple increasingly marketing and finance department driven product engineering is upetting more & more of their users, we’ll see how their sales & shares do…