New MacBook Pros with SD card slot…

SSDs already can saturate the SATA 2 bandwidth

I can't believe the new 13" MBP's don't have separate headphone & line-in jacks. They use one port to do double duty. That makes about ZERO sense to me.

But the bad news: the ExpressCard slot is gone. In its place is a SD card reader. This is not a good trade, regardless of the fact that you can now carry an SD card as an emergency boot drive (yes, you read that right: repartition a standard SDHC card into GUID and you can make it bootable). But the problem is that the real pros that are buying the MacBook Pro need the slot for its bus access. It's what allows videographers to use extremely fast eSata drives, audiographers to use real digital input, and photographers to get decent external drive performance (for backups of images). There is no alternative available. "Use a Firewire card reader," says Apple. Apparently they don't come back to the hotel at the end of the day with several 16GB CompactFlash cards to download and to create backups of. If Steve Jobs had to sit in my room and chat with me while I waited for cards to transfer with the new machine and then to an external drive, there'd be a new model with the ExpressCard slot restored in days, I think.

Thing is, I thought us pro designers, illustrators, videographers, and photographers were relatively core to Apple's success. The message they're sending is "we don't design for you much any more." Great. The message we might send back is "we don't buy from you much any more, nor do we tend to recommend your product as much."

Couple such decisions with the now unswappable battery--what does Apple have against user-swappable batteries?--and the glossy-only screens, and the slower internal SATA bus (back to 1.5Gbs from 3, which slows any really fast SST drive you might want to use) and it seems we get as many steps backward as we do forward. But then, maybe Apple really wants to sell more to the masses now. Funny thing is, the masses want lower prices first and foremost. Us pros, we'll pay for the features we need.

I know, "just get a 17". Sorry, but the extra size and weight don't fit my bag needs or those of other pros. Personally, I don't need a new laptop yet (though I would have liked to address more memory), so I'll just skip another generation of update.

I've read speculations before that the reason Apple dropped FW from laptops was to get the pros into buying towers again as many were favoring laptops as their workstations for video/photo/audio editing instead of the Pro towers or the top of the line MBPs.

Thom Hogan, professional photographer, does NOT like the new SD card feature in the Macbook Pro.

My old work Dell was a USB wireless - to me express card wireless is sorta old tech ?

I had a USB Clear Wire so called broadband was okay for internet but when it came to youTube you can forget that it just won't play or maybe was my airport/ Honolulu location ?