MacWorld MacBook Only a Prototype?

mahju writes "Hard Mac is reporting that Apple's, unoffical, response in Paris to the the lack of information on battery life, is that the MacBook Pro that were demoed at Mac World SF are only prototypes and the final versions are still under development. "

Comments

Wow

[daveschroeder]

Um, how on earth is this news?

Anyone at Macworld 13 days ago could see that the MacBook Pro units on display didn't have proper serial numbers, and it was no secret that they were development units. "Prototypes" is probably a little overboard, but yeah, they were not final, shipping production units.

Considering that it has always been known that the MacBook Pro wouldn't be shipping for another month or so, and was in fact represented as such, is it any surprise that units displayed a month and a half before the unit started shipping wouldn't yet, well, you know, be shipping units?

Now if Apple rolls out iTimeMachine at some point in the future, I'll consider eating my words.

Re:Wow

[daveschroeder]

I believe that these would be more accurately described as "pre-production". If the semantics are important to you, these were definitely NOT "prototypes", with what that term implies. These were essentially finished-goods units. Any speculation on whether or not they should have had battery life specs ready before ship, and guesses as to why they didn't, is just that: speculation and guesses.

Re:I think the lack of high-speed firewire is news

[daveschroeder]

Even as a Wintel type, I liked having Apple push for an even-higher-speed Firewire spec, in the hopes that it would filter down to the rest of the world eventually. That they're giving up now and going with strictly hardware Intel can provide... well, it's a disappointment.

I agree with you, but this, as you say, is likely a result of Apple going pretty much straight vanilla with Intel CPUs and chipsets in its new machines. This can, of course, be a good thing and a bad thing, depending on your perspective.

Re: The problem with FW800

[drhamad]

FW is a great spec - both in 400 & 800 varieties. It's FAST - we all know that. However, Intel was smart with USB. Beyond bundling it with all their boards, I mean. They made USB2 the same connector and backwards compatible with USB1.1. I assume that there was simply no way to do that with FW800/400, but that's what is killing it. It's simply too hard to include 2 different connectors on one board, especially when the 2nd connector (800) is totally incompatible with anything previous, there's no demand for it (that's faster than most devices could run) and there's few devices out that would run on it, even if they are fast enough.

Those connectors needed to be backwards compatible.

Re:I think the lack of high-speed firewire is news

[daveschroeder]

Your argument doesn't transfer.

SCSI was slowly dying from the original Power Macs in 1994 through the first iMac and Blue & White G3, the first machines to ship without it. By that time, Macs were already using internal IDE hard disks and optical drives. It wasn't as if this was some sort of a surprise. Also, SCSI usage was most definitely not increasing; it was decreasing drastically.

With FireWire, it is *the* transport of choice, and usually the only transport, for all DV and HDV cameras, decks, and other video equipment, and is increasingly used on high end DTV and HDTV equipment and other high end audio/video equipment As long as that is true, and as long as half of iLife depends upon DV transport to get data into the computer and the applications (iMovie, iDVD), FireWire isn't going anywhere. Now, could DV cameras transition to USB 2.0 over the next years? Sure. And if they do, fine. (The integrated iSight in the new Macs is USB, for what it's worth.)

I'm sure FireWire will eventually, like anything, be replaced by another standard. But for now, it's here to stay for quite some time.