The Mac community seems to be quite enraged about Apple’s decision to slowly get rid of Firewire on the new MacBooks. The newly-introduced smaller MacBook (13-inch) has no Firewire port whatsoever and the larger MacBook Pro (15-inch) only has a Firewire 800 port. So if you’re still recording on miniDV, where the default connection has been — and still is — Firewire 400, you can either upgrade your camcorder or use an adapter.
Apple has been known to get rid of technologies that were still sort of mainstream (think floppy drive). Looking back most of those decisions were right, but they nevertheless caused an uproar when they were announced.
The thing is, when you look at the current market for consumer camcorders, they’re almost entirely equipped with nothing but USB 2.0. And, when you look closer, the actual connectivity isn’t really that important anymore, since many current consumer camcorders write their data to removable media, such as SD. So where you used to hook up your camcorder to your Mac or PC via cable, you now simply stick in the SD card. That is, if you have a PC. Apple seems quite oblivious to the fact that an SD card slot on a MacBook would actually be quite useful. Probably interferes with their design principles…
Anyway, it’s important to remember that Apple is, bottom line, a consumer electronics company that targets mainstream consumers. Even if they’re still dubbing the higher-end MacBooks “Pro”, it’s quite obvious that the only machine in Apple’s portfolio that is still genuinely targeted at professionals is the Mac Pro. And in that light it makes perfect sense to get rid of a technology the majority of potential users will not use.
EDIT: Here’s a nice assessment of why the new MacBooks don’t have Firewire:
http://brockerhoff.net/bb/posting.php?mode=track&p=2557
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