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.

Yesterday Apple had their last Macworld address and while the releases were moderately interesting, one of the most controversial  is perhaps the announcement regarding the non-removable battery for the newly announce 17” Macbook Pro. Now, I don’t imagine too many livePA artists are using 17” Pros to do their live performances because lets be honest, the things are huge. But this non-removable battery could very well be setting a design standard that we will all see trickle down into the 15” and 13” models come the next revision.

So in this new Macbook, Apple is claiming to have developed a super long batter that lasts up to eight hours and can have over 1000 charge cycles. Interesting, but I think we all honestly can admit that the real world charge life will last probably around 50%-70% of that claimed by Apple. So, 4-6 hours roughly. While the main crux of this debate and disappointment from many people comes down to the fact that business users cannot change batteries when on a long flight and so forth, I think there is a much bigger and more important issue here that most people are failing to discuss. That issue is of course the lack of accessibility to the internals of the machine itself now.

I personally have never once considered purchasing a second battery for my Macbook and I imagine the vast majority of laptop users out there, even “Pro” users are in the same boat. What I have done though is wanted to upgrade my Macbook as it grew older. Install a new harddrive with a higher RPM, add more RAM, etc.  And while the new 17” Macbook comes packed with a nice 320 GB harddrive and 4GB of ram, this is certainly not the max of what it can handle. A few years down the road even, the cost of putting in a 1TB drive may only be $100, who knows. What Apple has done here though is effectively remove the personal upgrade options of the laptop from the user. No longer can someone really extend the life of their machine an extra few years by adding a bigger, faster harddrive or more RAM. You are now forced to either purchase a new machine or pay the exorbitant amount of extra cost to have the upgrade done at purchase.  We all know that PC manufacturers charge an “arm and a leg” for harddrive and RAM upgrades at purchase.

The upgrade from 4GB of DDR3 Ram on the Macbook Pro 17” to 8GB of RAM costs a whopping $1,200!!!!!!! Admitingly, DDR3 ram is newer to the market and I could not find 2x4GB sticks for sale at either Newegg.com or TigerDirect.com at the time of this writing, but comparable RAM from both of those sites in 2x2GB configurations runs $200 at the most.

This is a slippery slope that Apple has begun to go down with regards to its customers. It is fairly easy to argue that the consumer market either doesn’t care or doesn’t notice these sorts of things, but I for one would like to think that the “Pro” market that all of us as musicians fall into are much more critical and demanding of our hardware.