It's not just hardware. Apple has officially abandoned Firewire protocol maintenance. We're okay at the moment, but how many more MacOS upgrades will we have where Firewire still works?
And I'm not an outlier case. There are a lot of audio professionals and semi-pros that depend on old Firewire interfaces. These were Apple's market for selling high-end laptops! This is basically just disregard for your oldest and frankly most profitable customers. If I didn't feel like a new MBP would actually be sacrificing functionality, I'd probably have upgraded already. Instead, I'm considering a platform switch. That's bad.
out of interest, which platform still has better firewire support? most windows laptops don't have them either.
btw, as someone who didn't use firewire, i hated that port. waste of space, could have used an extra usb port instead. and it wasn't like there was a lot of gear that used it, unlike e.g. ethernet or vga which sometimes came in handy (i also loath vga).
FireWire is a EOL technology at this point so why would they be continuing to work on the protocol ?
And actually you aren't Apple's most profitable customer since you are still clamouring for old technologies. It's early adopters that upgrade every year that are the most valuable to Apple.
They clearly are not Apple's most profitable customers if they're abandoning the tech. If they were Apple's most profitable customers, you'd see Firewire on everything.
You could replace FireWire in that sentence with LaserDiscs, BetaMax etc. Fact is some technologies just don't take off enough to warrant long term support.
We're living in a transitory period as we move from a world of wires and connectors to a wireless world. This is the pain we have to endure as technology is pushed forward.
If it were up to the luddites and their obsession with compatibility, a laptop would have a dvd drive, firewire, usb-a, usb-c, thunderbolt, hdmi, dvi, vga, sd, microsd,vga, and display port all in one laptop chassis.
Having one single port, that can do all those things and do them just as well, is a far preferable alternative. Couple that with the future transition to wireless-only technology, and we're on our way to the future.
This Luddite has rather a lot of money invested in a professional grade audio interface. Replacing it with modern connectivity would be upwards of a thousand dollars. Ouch. And it works perfectly. Why am I throwing away hardware that I like and trust for the relentless march to the future?
Any recording interface more substantial than a headphone jack is wired. It's going to remain that way for a while. Audio is a quasi-realtime problem with a lot of bandwidth. Neither Bluetooth nor 802.11 are really reliable enough for the task, and won't be for some time to come.
Preserving investment in hardware that works, rather than making a risky expenditure on hardware that may or many not work (and will change process), isn't "Luddite". It's realist. We have the same problem with much more static tech, like ATMs and voting machines. The "one single port" dream you're spouting? I've heard that dream before. It was called "Firewire" back then. Another decade or so, and we'll be digging Lightning connectors out of our junk drawer and saying "Hey, remember this? Do we even need to keep this anymore?"
But this is where I get pragmatic. I know I have compatibility issues, so I'm looking at semi-retiring the MBP just for the heavy lifting and compatibility of audio, and maybe looking at what else can be done about photo editing. And a Chromebook for web browsing and other not-hard-work sounds better and better all the time.
> Why am I throwing away hardware that I like and trust for the relentless march to the future?
It's all part of change. It's inconvenient(change) when done well, and absolutely show-stopping when done poorly. Apple took a ham-fisted approach to this, and decided you should go through that right now. Not a lot of choice left to people like you(those with significant hardware investments) beyond using refurb gear, or spending a large sum on a brand new set of hardware and accessories(which will go through this same cycle again in the future).
It kind of all stinks, but there isn't a terrible lot us little people can do about it.
Look up the latency in the USB specs. There is a reason that professional audio equipment used FireWire. Thunderbolt is better, and there is some equipment available for it, but frankly it is overkill. And even then it only works with some USB-C ports, with some cables.
Many inexpensive USB C docks will have firewire. And I've used fw interfaces in the past for audio, I honestly prefer newer options but hey if it works just don't update anything and you'll be find until it dies.
Why would you throw away hardware that works? Your current computer still works with it, right? And if that stops working and you need to get another computer, there are adapters that will make it work with the new hardware that don't require you to spend thousands. I don't see the issue here. If the hardware is more important to you, buy the adapters needed. If the computer is more important, buy the new hardware to go with it. The new computers don't suddenly cause your perfectly good hardware to be unusable.
Many interfaces of yore didn't do USB (especially ones with lotsa I/O). So many jumped on the FW train due to bandwidth and the fact that USB 3.0 just wasn't in audio hardware developer's sights.
Apogee Ensemble Firewire. A Thunderbolt replacement would be $2500. There are other, less expensive options, but I'm still stuck with a minimum of $300 (new interface that supports ADAT, reuse the Ensemble with that) and probably upwards of $1000 to get equivalent functionality. This, on top of the cost of a new computer.
Yeah it may suck for you, but it won't suck for the people that buy whatever this equipment is and then use it over USB-C once that company makes the conversion.
It's like if we had no common way of measuring things. Imagine having to walk around with like 10 different tape measures because there was no standard. It's stupid. All of these different port interfaces are just like that.
Yeah. It's no big deal. Santa will be coming by real soon with new shiny USB Type C toys to replace our obsolete ones. It's a good thing Santa can write blank checks.
You as the individual don't matter. Parts will fail, components will need to be replaced, time moves forward. The future will be those same devices (or similar) using a single cable that will be compatible with everything, or it will be wireless. If for some reason it's not, then you just buy an adapter (which people do now anyway).
Your view is short-sighted. You're saying "What about me? What about right now?".
I'm a customer. Of course I matter. They're losing sales because they're not giving me any reason to stay, and multiple reasons to go. That matters.
Suppose I bite the bullet and switch to Windows? Apple's lost me then. They're not going to win me back. And that's not just the Mac. That's maybe my next phone. My next pad. My next router (oh wait, they're getting out of the wireless router game too).
Losing customers who have been with them for decades, who have spent thousands and thousands of dollars on their products and will stop? That fucking well matters.
As for losing customers, well, then we will look at the sales numbers.
I wasn't "happy" with the new MacBook Pro lineup, but I personally love the direction they're going. The only bad thing is the price increase, but they will drop the price.
But for your "I'm a customer I matter" comment. No you don't. Apple isn't going to let people who want a gigantic laptop with a million different ports get in the way of a wireless or standardized port world. I hate the fact that my work monitors have all these connections. You have all these cords coming out, different port types that do the same thing, and how many times has somebody gone to a meeting only to have to bring some dongle or find out that they have hdmi and the conference room is vga only or something? All of that is stupid. It's 2016. We can do better. I don't want to be tethered to the wall or a some device like a slave.
So basically, Apple has chosen a direction, and that direction may make sense, but it involves abandoning longtime loyal customers who were/are dependent on parts of the Apple ecosystem they're no longer supporting.
Last time I bought a new Mac was five years ago, but at that time their website had a quiet corner where you could buy the remaining stock of the previous models at a substantially reduced price. They also sold refurbs of current and previous models with further discounts. I bought just after a new-model announcement, and got the machine I'd been looking at the previous week for ~25% off.
One single cable or one single port? I thought the problem with the USB Type-C port was that there is a myriad of different USB C cables that "fit" into the port but each cable has different capabilities and thus your device may only work with a certain USB C cable.
Except there needs to be some BENEFITS on the other side. What you're saying is he should upgrade for the sake of upgrading, at great cost, to something that will do effectively the same thing except in a bass-ackwards fashion.
I'm not opposed on principle to a Macbook with a touchbar but I'm not buying, why? Because it has plus or minus the same specs as my current model which also connects to my monitors and everything else I use. Why would I impose that cost and pain on myself? Just to have the latest and greatest for the sake of it? Screw that, I'd rather be a luddite than a lemming.
I can't agree more. Wires are the best. Unfortunately we're in the rapidly shrinking minority. Most people would rather put up with regressions in reliability and debugability in the name of ease of use.
I lived in a house with several roomates for a year or so, and I never ever had a problem with the internet because I used an ethernet cable. My roomates went through 3 wireless routers and a wireless repeater and they were never able to completely solve the myriad of issues that comes with wireless technology on a congested spectrum.
It really boggles my mind that they'd allow themselves to be frustrated, waste many combined hours of their life troubleshooting, and spend hundreds of dollars on network hardware when the solution is SO SIMPLE and dates back to 1970s.
How about trying to find the PC with the beaconing condition? That shuts down the entire ring? Usually someone copied another DOS PC configuration that uses the same Token Ring address. Engineers were good for that. 1994 or 1995 and they bought a new PC and instead of filling out sheets to have IT set up the PC they tried to do it themselves.
Technology in this context isn't an investment. Wires aren't investments. Wires are a cost. Imagine if your kids grow up and never have to buy a single cable for anything. How much money would that save them over their lives? What if these kids grow up in a world where things are connected, seemingly alive, because they just know about the presence of other things and can "talk" to those things and do your bidding?
This is what we're moving to. It sucks that people can't see that.
This is only going to happen in the professional audio world if you can build wireless protocols with sufficient reliability in terms of latency - bandwidth isn't the problem, latency is. Neither Bluetooth nor 802.11 are designed for guaranteed latency. Firewire was designed explicitly for it. USB not so much, but it can be adequately faked. But wireless? I don't see that happening anytime soon. Right now, I can't get my computer to reliably do Bluetooth from ten feet away to handle a single one-way stereo stream. That's crap.
So this wireless dream future? It's just a dream, for those who have more demanding needs than surfing the web.
The pain is completely self imposed. Wired ports and wireless technology are not mutually exclusive. USB-C is great bit there's no reason to remove all other ports. Technology will get adopted. It doesn't have to be forced.
IMO they should have given us one transition model before going all USBC. Leave one USBA, HDMI, sdcard slot (my wife and I use it all the time, and it is the pro after all, used by many in graphics arts, film, and photography). Downgrade power to USBC (yeah, losing magsafe or moving it to a dongle is a downgrade) if you must, replace the thunderbolts and other USBA with USBC.
That way I'd have a chance to actually pick up any USBC devices whatsoever before moving to a laptop that can only connect to USBC without dongles. 'Cuz right now I have zero, and so does my Mac-only office. Even the couple of USBC Android testing phones floating around come with a to-A USB cable, so I'd have to buy a new cable for them.
The people who compared the USB-C move to Apple's past moves were completely ignoring that in the past Apple replaced the FLoppy drive with the CD rom, but still kept all the other ports around.
This time round Apple has replaced every port with a USB-C port, which means I don't need to transition only 1 interface. I need to transition all.
And the most painful part about this move is they are doing it to the product line that in the past was loved because it came with USB + FW400 + FW800 + Video + Magsafe. IOW, a design goal for the Pro line used to be easy compatibility so professionals could end up in any situation and have a great chance of getting their computers to work with their environment without any adapters.
Yes, but that was consumer / education market gear first (iMac) as I recall.
More or less back on topic ... I bought a HP Probook for my on-the-road studies/work last cycle because I needed a portable that I could do _work_ with and repairability, matte screen, mouse buttons, VGA, HDMI, and whole lot of other things were much more important to me than width or mass or shiny. It came with Windows and it's well supported.
I would like to get another 17" macbook pro someday (mine is pretty old and 80% retired), and this move and the messaging around it suggests that Apple doesn't care to make one. It's no surprise, but it still stings a bit, and as noted else where it is breathtakingly clumsy for their remaining mac business (as is that press conference).
The problem with USB-C as "the one port to rule them all" is that it is impossible to produce a cheap cable and still meet the design spec. Even major smartphone manufacturers have been caught including underspec cables with their phones that damage one device or the other right out of the box. This isn't just limited to USB-A to USB-C cables, there are plenty of USB-C to USB-C cables that pose a potential threat when pushed to their power transmission limits.
USB-C was a great idea taken one step too far. USB-C would be perfect if it hadn't been saddled with the requirement to handle 100 Watts of power. That's an overkill requirement for a feature that wasn't demanded by anyone aside from OEMs looking to cut an additional charging port off the bill of materials.
As soon as someone invents an isochronous wireless interface with guaranteed throughput and latency, I'm sure all the recording studios will switch to that.
His point is that fundamental physics and information theory limit how good a wireless link can be. So wired links will always perform better and therefore high-end audio engineering will run cables forever.
Technically, you could create an isosynchronous wireless protocol. But 802.11 ain't it, and neither is Bluetooth. Both are very tolerant of lag and have little guarantee of latency.
It's not a deficiency. Laptops can't do everything. Apple can't build a computer that caters to every edge case. That's why I don't complain that I can't play the latest video games on my laptop, or run 50 VM boxes or something.
But I'm not complaining that it can't do something magical and new. I'm complaining that it can't do what the same product could do from the same vendor five years ago.
My laptop has nearly all of those ports, and more besides. It's fantastic. The obsession with light weight and slimness is silly. Lugging around a five pound or even ten pound laptop is not that much of a burden.
Wireless technology needs to get a whole lot more reliable to get its foot in my door.
I don't really care for making the laptops increasingly thin, but the ports are just nonsense. Carrying around a 10 pound laptop with a trunk full of adapters is going to be a thing of the past and I can't wait for the future.
