Apple phasing out firewire?

[antichef]

I'm typing this on a brand new Macbook pro - the reason I have it is that my 1.75 year old regular macbook just went brick on me, and the Apple genius person at the Apple store said I'd have to cough up about $980 for a main board replacement (ouch! - extended warranty = good, I guess). Since regular macbooks were on sale for $999, I figured I'd just get one of those instead.

I stepped over with an Apple sales guy to look at the new $999 Macbook, and quickly noticed that it had no firewire port (important to me, because I have three firewire audio interfaces, and regularly use two of them) - I asked him about this, and he said that Apple was "phasing out firewire" (maybe just on the laptops, but I didn't ask) - he then started selling me on USB2, but I cut him off, of course. To get a current laptop with a firewire interface, I had to go up to the Macbook pro, which I did.

Anyway -- this kind of sucks, doesn't it? I had planned to use my existing audio interfaces for a while! I guess I'll be getting extended warranty support for this Macbook pro - they said I have a year to get it.

 

[dgatwood]

Apple store employees know about as much on the subject as you do, i.e. pretty much zero. The people who know Apple's plans in this area all work in Cupertino, and aren't generally the talking type when it comes to future product plans.

My gut says that since the GPU in the consumer laptops is much more comparable to the pro laptops, they needed some reason to convince people to buy the pro laptops, and they picked FireWire.... The best thing you can do to change their minds is to buy a white MacBook with FireWire (which they still sell) and send feedback to tell them why....

P.S. You should always, always, always get the extended warranty on Mac laptops. As you found out, a single repair for basically anything costs 2-3 times what the extended warranty costs....

 

[antichef]

Well the guy was pretty up front about the difference between the pro and non-pro being just the width of the screen, for the most part, and was actually pushing me toward the less expensive version, since he said that unless I was doing video editing and the like that I'd be wasting money on the pro. But then there was the matter of the firewire port... OK, so maybe they're not "phasing out firewire", but if they're only putting it on their $2k+ notebooks now, then it's still something to consider when shopping for interfaces, no?

Oh, and I have already had a try at talking to Cupertino about other stuff -- I've got a brick wall outside that I go talk to for encouragement afterward

 

[dgatwood]

Oh, and I have already had a try at talking to Cupertino about other stuff -- I've got a brick wall outside that I go talk to for encouragement afterward

If you mean AppleCare folks, they're not in Cupertino (well, except maybe a few upper tier managers, not sure). The call centers are all either in Elk Grove (CA), Austin (TX), some place in Illinois (I forget what city), Cork (Ireland), or... I think there might be one or two others; not sure where, though.

Last I was aware, for the U.S., it is mostly Austin, with education calls mostly being handled in Illinois, IIRC. I know this because a higher-ed AppleCare tech took a laptop call for me once and I was baffled because I wasn't higher-ed. He explained that they sometimes get overflow PowerBook calls (possibly after hours) routed to them. That was three or four years ago, though, so some of the assignments may have changed since then, of course.

Yeah, I've talked to AppleCare a few times.

 

[TimOBrien]

The Macbook Pro's have Expresscard slots.

All you have to do is put a firewire card in them......

(That's what expansion slots are for!)