Hi
The FW-loss fuss from the video crowd ain't nothing compared to the music/audio-tech crowd's howls. :-(
A lot of it directly to
http://www.apple.com/feedback/macbook.html
The audio interface industry is just now by-passing PCIe in favour of FW....
However David Roth Weiss and others here have been saying for months (years) that buying into FW technology for video is investing in an EOL technology. Which I totally agree with.
Apple over the last decade has never been a company that listens to its customers. It is proud of its abilities to take its product range into unimagined territory - where no feedback process could conceivably take them, confident that users will welcome their new-found opportunities...
Apple chucks away technology as freely as it invents - the abandonment of the serial port and floppy disks 10 years ago was just as catastrophic for music hardware/software users. SCSI's more or less gone gone gone.
Video production Mac users have spent the last 5 years bemoaning the lack of the 4th PCI slot that disappeared with the demise of the G4 tower range. Did Apple listen?
The trouble, this time, is that the dots just don't join up for us to move on easily. :-(
USB isn't a viable alternative for (some) video or (most) audio professionals.
eSATA cable technology is as limiting as SCSI was before it - useable in fixed installations but impossibly inflexible for on-the-move use.
Cabled Gig-Ethernet is beset by old-fashioned/inappropriate protocols for high-bandwidth streaming workflows, and wi-fi is still too primitive.
But. Just as it was about floppies 10 years ago, so today its dead on the money to aim for simple uncluttered mainly-wireless technologies for the average, majority, user-base. I reckon.
We just need high-bandwidth/low latency network protocols to come along and it can all work out for the best for everybody. :-)
