Be Excellent To Each Other

I am on a 2 gig a month data bolt on for my P1i, but as far as I am aware 02 don't give a toss what I do with it. Now granted the Jesusphone is more data intensive and everything is "unlimited" but frankly it's Apple calling the shots here not 02. People want these phones so if Apple wanted to they could tell everyone to go to hell and enable tethering instead. It's their usual sickening "we know best" attitude that has also seen the removal of one of the firewire ports from the new Macbook Pro's despite Pro users being exactly the kind of people WHO BLOODY USE FIREWIRE APPLE YOU STUPID DICKS!

Is the Blackberry data tariff unlimited or capped? How is it billed?

And there you go, that's the problem. If Apple had insisted on tethering, the networks would have refused to put an unlimited plan on it, and instead would cap at 2Gb or so. Apple made the call that unlimited data would sell the device better.

That might be the case now but I strongly suspect the tethering issues will be covered in the contracts they drew up with the carriers back when the iPhone launched. It was still an unknown quantity then, so Apple were in a weaker negoitating position -- recall that three of the UK's networks passed on the iPhone.

Hmm. Personally, I see this as another "no floppy disc in the iMac" thing: it seems controversial now, but in a few years we'll wonder what the fuss was about because who uses firewire anyway? No-one except a small vocal minority of DV geeks with slightly outdated cameras. So, you. Sorry.

I don't understand why people refuse to understand Apple is a business, and makes decisions for commercial reasons. They are not refusing to support tethering in order to piss you off.

FTFY.

My data plan is unlimited and fixed rate - but it's a corporate tariff.

I've got unlimited* and fixed rate on Orange (and, obviously, my phone can tether to other stuff if I want it to, what with it not being cool enough to get away with being rubbish).

*20GB

I don't think that's true any more, most of Apple's money these days come from high-end consumer sales. People who got an iPod then bought a MacBook(pro) because they liked it.

And I would imagine costs a very pretty penny.

Oh goodness yes - it costs a fortune. But then it rather goes to show that unlimited tethered data is available from the carrier, so it shouldn't be restricted by the device.

Anyone who uses Pro-Audio interfaces, especially on a laptop. PCI or FW are you're only safe bets in getting stable, low-latency audio throughput... and then you can only use Texas Instruments Chipsets otherwise it's gonna still be shit. Basically, until development of a feasible alternative that the hardware peeps actually bother to utilise (USE EXPRESSCARD, FUCKING COME ONE!) then we got no choice. USB audio interfaces can fuck right off - utter pile of shite. FW is niche, but without it, people like me are pretty much fucked.

Q: Who buys Mac Pros?
A: Photo editors, video editors, audio bods and people with more money than sense.

And to whoever said video wasn't important to Apple, then why do they still produce Final Cut Pro? Is it so they can ensure there will never be a PC version so they can keep it as a USP for the Mac? Errr, yes.

So given that a large number of users are video editors (which Apple acknowledge when they push the Macbook and Final Cut), lets examine how video professionals can store/transfer video.

USB - Nope, no professional camera supports USB.

DVD - Don't be daft.

Hard disk - Expensive battery hungry units that are great for conferences and little else.

Memory cards - Just starting to make inroads, but are hugely expensive and have massive workflow implications that, at the moment at least, scare off all but the most technical and wealthy editors.

Firewire from DV, DVCAM or HDV tape- Cheap, reliable and very widespread.


Your claim that Firewire is outdated is entirely false and is based on no decent reasoning. Sony are still churning out their latest HD cameras equipped with firewire because it's a standard. Until we all move to tapeless, which could be five years or more, there's still demand for DV.

The problem with only one socket is that you then can't save the data straight out to another Firewire device without a hub. Which is annoying in the field frankly.

Yes, we'd all love tapeless but it's expensive and has huge issues attached to it. If Apple have removed one of the sockets in a couple of years time I could understand it, but they have shown that they fundamentally don't understand part of their userbase. We still want our Firewire sockets because we like our fast hard disks and we like being able to transfer directly from our cameras to our hard disks. Fuck USB, it's a slow waste of time.

If there's one thing I think Apple to better than anyone else, it's that they don't compromise the design of a thing trying to chase every niche market they can. They don't try to be all things to all men, because almost every time that is your overriding philosophy, you make a device that doesn't do anything particularly well.

Yes, for a cost, where the cost is what keeps the p2p using peons off the service. If I could tether my £35/month unlimited iPhone tariff, I could cancel my home ADSL and do my 50Gb/month torrent traffic through the cell network instead. Suppose my cell serves another hundred iPhone users and has two T1s as the upstream connection. Doesn't really work out, does it? Not without massive, massive investment from the mobile operators to vastly upgrade their entire backbone. I think I read somewhere it's hard to get investment money at the moment due to something to do with sheets, a "turndown" or something.

Your last category there -- smug Nathan Barley types in loft studio flats in major cities -- outnumber the others hundreds to one.

Look, I don't think for one second that Apple dropped the second FW port without thinking hard about the pluses and minuses. I bet they even talked to a bunch of folk before they did it. I reckon they understand their market better than you or I, and I also reckon if the "plus" column didn't add up to more than the "minus" column they wouldn't have done it.

I also reckon when they release sales figures for the new less-Firewire models, they'll still be selling strongly, although the state of the economy will cloud the numbers. Chinny, surely you remember the "no floppy disc" complaints about the iMac? Your post there reads exactly the same, but in the end no-one actually cared as much as they thought they did. A small number of pros will complain loudly, buy a Firewire hub, and suck it up.

Edit -- I do think they missed a trick by not putting eSATA on though, which is much, much more useful in the consumer space.

Edit edit -- also, by dropping the FW port from the Macbook whilst keeping the (singular) port on the MBP, they are also (of course) upselling people who need Firewire, who are mostly doing pro-level stuff and therefore will mostly stump up the extra cash.

It won't make one iota of difference to the sales figures, but proves yet again that Apple do what they want. No Blue-Ray, no E-SATA, and lack of a second Firewire port.

And remember, Apple kept the Firewire port off the standard Macbooks because they were terrified that now the Macbook has a decent graphics card that can run Motion (part of Final Cut Studio), people like me would buy one of them instead.

And in anycase, I don't remember using many floppies by the time the Imac came out.

If it doesn't effect sales, why the hell would any business in their right mind do anything different? All they care about -- and all they should care about -- is getting products out the door and getting money in. There'll be some spreadsheet somewhere in Cupertino that shows that dropping the second port saves $x per unit manufactured, and if you can save $x per unit without losing any sales, that's free money. Would you turn down free money? Yes, it comes attached with a lot of forum bitching, but that doesn't cost you anything if the forum bitchers are still buying Apple products anyway. Which, we agree, it seems they are.

The lack of BluRay is, I suspect, a strategic thing; they are chasing a long-term stake in the downloads market with AppleTV and strengtening BluRay would only weaken that (already slightly shaky) position.

Lack of eSATA I cannot explain, because I think it would make a lot of sense, but I suspect there's a reason if you look hard enough. Again, it might come down to cost, or port placement -- it may literally be that to fit an eSATA jack they'd have to drop something else, and the MB isn't over-endowed with ports as it is.

Aha good point, I hadn't considered that. Indeed, the MB would have cannibalised the MBP sales quite nicely if they hadn't done that. Again though, this is nothing but good business sense.

I was one of the people who thought it was bonkers, but in hindsight I was wrong.

But we're talking a premium laptop here. A laptop that is supposed to have USP's. It's not Acer sitting there shaving features off a 300 quid laptop that then has to be sold through third parties, this is a laptop costing over a grand that Apple sell themselves (which ensures more markup than they would get if they sold it through the likes of Ebuyer). That's the problem. This is the all singing and dancing model.

If you had a £2k budget to buy a laptop for work, what would you get?

Hookers and Heroin.

Cool, come be our firm's CFO. And sign off this purchase order for the company Gallardo.

You can only get one chick in a Gallardo. I'll get you a Range Rover.

No bother, you just need a roof rack and a party trailer.

Few people will be given that kind of opportunity frankly. I could barely scrape to a refurb 15 inch which was about £1100. Still an obscene amount of money for a laptop but I had no choice.

But like I say, it's a premium product and should be bristling with ports, not shonky old USB.

Anyway, back to phones. What do I get?

Surely a hatchery back would be more..

Oh never mind.