Comments on: Want a FireWire, Non-Pro MacBook? The $999 MacBook is Looking Better

By: Patrick

Patrick — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 04:00:21 +0000

yes, firewire audio with fireface400 works with the whitebook (early 2009 nvidia grfx)

By: florian

florian — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 15:36:54 +0000

has anyone here tried out if the new white macbook
(early 2009) works with the RME fireface 400. ?

By: Jason

Jason — Sat, 31 Jan 2009 17:19:20 +0000

Ah… has anyone looked at OSx86 stuff lately? it’s pretty solid these days. I got an old Thinkpad t40 up and running in like an hour and that’s SSE2.

of course I’m also one of those guys who bought a refurb MBP the day they announced the departure of Firewire 400.

By: ZANE

ZANE — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 00:07:00 +0000

I feel so fricken giddy!
This is just so true, who needs the Pro when the Mac Book will simply rock the heck out of any Host app & almost VST!!!
I have a MacBook Intel core2 duo w/ 4 gigs of Ram & a new 500Gig Hd.
She flys…….
I run Logic, & have Reason open plus other plugs and she just keeps rockin steady!!
Save yer money people….it’s all in how you set up your machine(s)

Enjoy,
Z

By: ekwipt

ekwipt — Sat, 24 Jan 2009 00:16:08 +0000

You should be able to bump up the speed of the RAM to 4Gb 800mhz, hopefully it has version 7 of the agere firewire chipset, i’m also hoping for this for the new 17″mbp and eventually for the current MBP15″. It will happen apple have acknowledged a problem with this chipset and agere have made a new version that works with cards such as RME fireface400, which will make a lot of people happy

By: terminal3

terminal3 — Fri, 23 Jan 2009 22:16:09 +0000

“still 2.0Ghz”

I think you’ll note that it’s immediate white predecessor was actually 2.1Ghz… so there’s actually been a marginal downgrade of outright speed here.

the FSB upgrade may make up for that in real terms, though, we shall see..!

By: janeoblivian

janeoblivian — Fri, 23 Jan 2009 05:29:13 +0000

“…it still has the older-style Mini-DVI video connector (which means it should still do analog TV output)…”

Nope doesn’t do it. Straight from Apple’s product page for the mini DVI-Video adapter:

“This adapter is not compatible with the 2.0GHz Intel Core 2 Duo white MacBook introduced in January 2009.”

So it would make sense that lack of Analog video support must have something to do w/ the new NVIDIA graphics? Please someone explain why.

By: ERS

ERS — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 17:47:58 +0000

You could always just have gotten a black case plurgid :P

http://www.speckproducts.com/

–

If you are concerned about HD speed, you can always get a fast external drive. I feel like anyone doing a lot of audio/video work should be doing it on an external scratch drive anyway since it is hard on the drive and, well, assuming you use your machine for non-music related stuff killing the internal drive sucks.

I seem to burnout about one external firewire drive per year.

By: plurgid

plurgid — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 16:19:11 +0000

So, I needed a laptop for playing out with my band. I’ve invested WAY too much money in my nice FW audio interface to even think about going back to USB.

I didn’t WANT to spend > two grand. But my choices were:

A) be the shining white apple beacon on stage
B) spend 2 grand on an aluminum macbook pro

For christ’s sake, why’d they have to discontinue the black one?

So yeah, I’m a sucker. I bought the macbook pro. And it’s aluminum: light bright and damn near white anyhow.

But I did get a more powerful machine.

Also … if you’re using this in a home studio and you’re worried about cpu eating plugins, know that you can run a logic nodes on other macs on your network.

So Logic will suck cpu resources from your other machines over the network … it works pretty damn well … even if the nodes aren’t on uhm … “legitimate macintoshes“. Not saying how I know that exactly … I uuh … heard that from a dude on the street …

By: zaq

zaq — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 12:50:17 +0000

any news on the firewire chip in this revision yet? is it the faulty agere or the revised one? (or even TI???) i have an rme fireface 400 and would be very interested if it works well with this recent revision…