Yup...it's a deterrent. As soon as i heard that i'd come running. Otherwise you'd have no idea...

i think it's both very cool, and practical.

If I am using PB in public there are usually other laptoppers around, often within a couple meters. A thief would be so obvious trying to pop open my lock with a ballpoint pen or struggling with carrying the chair that I cable-locked the laptop to, since my table neighbors would be aware that it is not his laptop. (Some chairs provide a closed loop to lock to, and is awkward enough to be a problem to carry stealthily out of a crowded room with a cabled laptop dangling from it).

Re. the modem: sounds like it's going the way of floppy drives. It won't be standard on MBP, but apparently you can request it be added for another $50.00. Some of us remember the days when Macs didn't come with modems and you had to buy an external one for $100 or so. Outside the big cities (where, apparently, most of you are living), dial-up is still the only way to connect to the net.

That said, it is rather impressive that PCs (including laptops) have continued to ship with almost every port and drive used in the past 10 years!

In case it wasn't clear, the $50 modem you can add to your MBP purchase is an external USB modem.

Do PCs still come with Parallel and Serial ports? I assume most PCs don't have DVI yet, but assume that will become a standard soon enough as Apple --once again-- has set the pace.

That's interesting. I read that online a few weeks back, but didn't believe it!

Very few non-Apple laptops include DVI. And the ones that have changed to DVI...well the manufacturers are getting complaints about the "missing" VGA connection... :rolleyes: As far as I know they all still include a modem. Most higher-end models have Firewire 400, but with a 4-pin connector, which is a pain. Serial ports have mostly disappeared, and parallel is going out. I recently got bitten by the missing serial port on a special-use A/V project, but a $20 USB to serial cable worked fine.

I thought I did, but that's not good enough, so I measured it tonight since I was doing a mirror and would have two of my multi-interface drives connected. Here are the results averaged from 3 trials each.

Conclusion? On a PowerBook with a 4200RPM drive, a FireWire 800 port is only an advantage if you often copy between FireWire 800 drives. I actually do need to do that, since I have a master external drive that I mirror to rotated backup drives, full of media too large to store on the PowerBook. Not the most common case, I suppose. Not sure how much difference it would be on newer Mac laptops with 5400 and 7200 RPM drives.

"Most higher-end models have Firewire 400, but with a 4-pin connector, which is a pain. "

I thought FW400 was universal. How does this differ from 6-pin (besides the two pin difference, of course)?

Is it too much to ask for RAID 0 and RAID 2 capabilities on a laptop?

Both connectors are within spec. The 6-pin can power the connected peripheral, like a bus-powered hard drive or webcam. The 4-pin has no power, so the peripheral must supply its own power source, like a video camera with its battery.

THIEF: "HA HA FREE LAPTOP"

ME: "HEY YOU WHAT DOES THAT LOOK LIKE A FREE LAPTOP"

ALARM: "WHAAAA"

THIEF: "OH CRAP"

FLOOR: "HEY CHECK OUT THIS NEW COMPUTER THAT JUST FELL ONTO ME"

MACBOOK PRO: "YOU IDIOT WHY DID YOU LEAVE ME UNATTENDED"

Can any apple remote disable the alarm though?

Read the part about pairing your remote to your machine.

Styrafome, useful test numbers, thanks.

As far as four vs. six pins, the lack of power is one annoyance but the biggest issue is that four pin cables aren't common, so you have to carry a cable or adapter if you expect to be able to plug into a FW device anywhere. The four pin "standard" is a Sony thing, and they hate using established standards, so they created that and called it iLink.

I shoulda mentioned I was copying a 600MB disk image.

If you can get dsl or cable internet in rural Arkansas i'd like to know where you cannot get it. Or maybe Arkansas isn't as bad as people like to think.

My guess is that you can't really get dsl outside of any corporation limits of any town -- not even in modern Arkansas. ;) I can't even get it in the suburb I live in in Wichita, KS, which has around 400,000 people. Same goes for cable internet; it's just not there outside of most corporation limits, and isn't provided in the smaller ones.

I don't know how it is for residential, however, on a recent cross-country driving trip we had free internet in every fleabag motel across the deep South.

Wow!
In Norway I think you have to go all the way down to villages with 3-digit populations before finding a place on the map without DSL. With mobile phone coverage, I don’t think you can find a single town or village without it.

But it is good to know that the USA is a developing country. ;)

I think that people who travel with their laptops are feeling screwed by Apple right now.

The lack of video out without the adapter means one more expense and another thing to carry (and lose).

The lack of the additional FW port means that video editing on the road becomes a royal PITA. Yes, you could add back a FW port with a card, but the end of the PC card slot is an end to cheap adapter cards. So there's another expensive add-on and another item to carry (and lose) and all of your old PC cards are instantly obsoleted.

...and then there's the modem. That's the point where a lot of people just said F-Apple. If you're using your laptop as a desktop replacement or just carting it back and forth between home and school or home and work then you probably don't care. But road warriors know how important that modem is -- wireless access points ARE NOT available in every hotel and coffee shop in the world. Neither are printers -- faxing a copy of a document to the front desk at a hotel has saved my ass many times. So add one more expense, one more thing to carry (and lose) and a whole bunch of pissed off travelers.

With luck, some of those problems will be addressed in future revisions. It has been suggested that the lack of FW 800 is due to Intel designing the board instead of Apple and the modem was supposedly left off because they had no room to cram it into the case. Maybe a future revision of the Mac Book will be a real portable.

But I doubt it. Steve doesn't change his mind. Putting a modem back would cause him to lose face. We might get FW 800. That's about the most I expect from today's Apple.

There are several reasons for this.
One begin that America is so large. Norway has 307,860 sq km of land while the US has 9,161,923 sq km.
Second, we have a great many residences that left Europe because it was too progressive and felt going to the uninhabited wilderness, save for the native savages, was the way to get way from evil (read: technology). If only they'd breed outside their own gene pool!

Cellulah cov’rage, breeding habits ’n gene pools
 

True, true. But the US has a population of 298.5 million, whereas Norway only has 4.6 million. (Mind you, that is not counting all the offspring of emigrants to Minnesota etc that still have at least 1/16th Norwegian genes in ’em.)

According to Wikipedia, the USA has a population density of 30 people per km2. (Now that’s counting Alaska.) Norway has only 14/km2. (Not counting Spitsbergen.) In other words less than half of the US. So actually the wilderness you speak of is on this side of the dam! :D

All in all, there really shouldn’t be any excuse for the lack of cellular or Cingular coverage in Eureka, CA (population approx 26 000), which I experienced 15 months ago. In fact I lost coverage a ways west of Redding, only regaining it a ways north of ’Frisco. Naturally, I thought there was somethin’ wrong with my cellulah, but an embarrased Cingulah dealer showed me the overwhelming white patches on the map. (Cingular’s ironic slogan: "Raising the bar")

Next time I travel, perhaps with a MacBook Pro, I’m naturally hoping to be greeted with better coverage and greater technological sophistication.

Europe being too progressive? Better breeding habits?
Well, now... Forum policy prevents me from commenting either of those assertions.
;)


With best regards,
ArcticStones