They've made no announcements to that effect. They've dropped FW800 off the MacBooks, but it's still on the towers. They are also still happily selling the iSight, which is Firewire only, and promoting the features that it adds into iChat. My suspicion is that they are re-positioning FW800. FW400 will remain on the laptops, and if folks need 800 for their editing work on laptops they can add a card for it. I do fairly large multitrack editing on a laptop and FW400 more than handles the traffic, so I think the demand at the portable level for FW800 just isn't there.
Beyond that, I believe they share a controller on the laptops, so the FW800 and the FW400 port can end up fighting for bandwidth. As a result heavy users are already better off adding a third party FW800 interface.
The same thing that makes Firewire fast (the separate controller chip), was the same thing that was preventing Apple from making the iPods as thin as possible.
The same thing that makes Firewire fast (the separate controller chip), was the same thing that was preventing Apple from making the iPods as thin as possible.
Ah. OK, now I don't mind that my two newest iPods don't have Firewire.
Firewire also provides more power. So, for example, if you have one of the small, svelte, portable external drives, most can do both power and data through a single Firewire connection, but it requries two USB cords - one for power, one for data.
Same for the laptop enclosures. One cord for Firewire, two for USB.
caltech store is having an enormous sale. 12" iBook for 849...which includes tax.
Damn. WANT. If I had done my taxes earlier, I could buy...I could buy by charging it and then use my taxes to pay it off.
Decisions...
I SO love that store, Allyson. For such a small space, they sure have a lot of nice Mac stuff.
That sale is on because there will probably be new iBooks (with Intel chips) released within the next month. There have been rumors that the new iBooks will be released at a significantly lower price point than old ones, so there may be a new, modern, $899 widescreen iBook that is much faster available in a month at the same store. OR, they may not lower the price at all, so this may be your only shot at that figure. Not to intentionally make your decision harder or anything.
It's always a gamble with Apple.
I wonder if there will soon be a flood of used PPC Macs on eBay.
Gud, I think there will be some but I'd be surprised if it was a flood. I would imagine people will let the pioneer users work out the kinks first.
Just got the current version of iListen. Haven't loaded it yet. I hope it has a higher accuracy rate than the last version I tried. I don't blame MacSpeech. I'm glad they're plugging away at it. I'm miffed at Apple for pissing away their lead in voice recognition in the '90s. The Mac has never caught up again. Still, I hate getting on the PC and the only reason I bought the damned thing was to use Naturally Speaking.
Ay. Must share...so last night while downloading an Office update, my Powerbook suddenly was all "You must restart NOW!" and gave me no other options. So I tried...and it got snagged in startup, and wouldn't go anywhere.
Went to the Apple Store this afternoon, and a very nice guy managed to boot me up from their firewire drive (I could also boot from the install DVD, but Disk Utility couldn't fix me) and save my info to their drive, then completely reinstall my OS. Sniff.
But the good news is, it worked (and it was free!)! And I got 99% of my stuff back! WHEW. I did feel bad for the other customers at the Genius Bar at the time--one was fucked (third time he'd brought the thing in to be replaced), and one was STUPID.
Needless to say, I now have a much more current and complete backup on my backup harddrive.
______________________________
As for the 1040, yes, you can type in it in Acrobat Reader, but not Preview. I downloaded Reader tonight, and managed to do my taxes. $400 won't buy me a new computer, but hopefully I won't be needing one for a bit...
Huh.
PCAnywhere 12 has Mac OS X as a variation. [link]
