First news from NAMM is trickling in. Akai has announced a new version of their APC line with the APC20. This is essentially half of the previously released APC40 from last year. The new APC20 features everything but some send effects, additional knobs and the crossfader from its older brother.

From the press online it appears that the APC20 is meant to be more of a companion kit then a standalone. You can chain up to six of them together.

Price is $199

http://www.akaipro.com/apc20

Korg has announced an updated version of their popular Kaossilator. The Kaossilator Pro is basically a step up from last year’s model and is analogous to the MiniKP and its bigger brother the KaossPad 3.

The Kaossilator Pro takes the same basic hardware specs and idea of the KP3 and focused on a sound source rather than an effects source. The overall idea sounds extremely appealing and it features 200 sounds (still not a true synth though) along with the ability to load PCM samples. It is not quite the sampled based KP4 many were hoping for, but it is a good start.

http://www.korg.com/Product.aspx?pd=564

Unibody Design

Last year’s controversioal decision to have a non-removalbe battery has made its way into the entire Pro line now and it is once again taking quite a bit of heat. For most users people aren’t going to be swapping out batteries, but for the real pro user that is a legitimet concern. The 5 hour expected battery on the 13″ MBP I am sure will end up probably something like 3.5 hours in real life. That being said I can’t say that I actually know another user, including myself who owns more than one battery for any laptop they own.

Addition of Firewire 800

So with the introduction of the new unibody Macbooks a little over a year ago Apple decided to remove the Firewire 800 port on all of the models except for the 17″ model . This was a particulalrly big blow to the platform for creative types since so many of our audio interaces, video devices, etc. connect via firewire for production. It is nice to see that Apple has decided to put this back into the Macbook Pros and also consolidate the entire line into FW 800.

Removal of ExpressCard Slots

Apparently when Apple giveth, Apple must also take away. With the inclusion of the Firewire 800 they have decided to remove the express card slots. While I can’t say that I know many producers who are using the slot, there is a fair number out there who may be running a DSP module or their audio interace off of this slot. This also sort of cuts out a lot of other little advantages to the machine.

SD Card Inclusion

While this might not have an immediate impact for music producers there is quite a bit of hardware these days that use SD cards for sample transfers. With SD cards as cheap as they as well the could also make an excellent solution for storing and retriving sample libraries.

SATA I vs. SATA II

So this one isn’t really a feature as it is a concern that was unearthed a few days ago. Apparently the new Macbooks that are shipping with standard harddrives are shipping with the slower SATA I architecture that caps HDD access speed to 1.5 mbps. Normally that is not such a big deal, but if one were to upgrade their drive to an SSD you would find you have a bottleneck pretty quickly. On the flip side the Macbook Pros that come with an SSD do have the SATA II architecture allowing up to 3.0 Mbps access speeds. This is a disappointing outcome, but I am not sure if it is really a deal breaker for many.

Conclusion

So what seems to be the web’s conclusion on the new Macbooks? Overall the reviews seem extremely positive. It is sort of an intersting take that Apple is going by making the Pro line have three sizes and keeping the Macbook line with the old model style that is only $200 cheaper. One would think that the Macbook is going to fade out entirely in the next year perhaps to something else (netbook? tablet?) the way it is configured now. On that same token though Apple has removed some of Pro features of the books for some more mainstream options. Good for the 90% of users out there, but perhaps not so good for those pro users who really need it. Overall  though it looks like the new MBP line probably wont have any major negative impacts on users, even music producers and I would presume that the accessories market will come to the rescue to provide adequate solutions to the minor niche problems that have arisen out of this transition.