New Macbooks - Mostly Hits, One Miss

The new Macbooks are pretty sweet.

They've improved in almost every category: better screen (with LED backlighting); svelte, lighter aluminum bodies; and of course faster processors and video cards. Oh, and there's that really cool-sounding enlarged iPhone-ish trackpad thingie. I say "cool sounding" because I really haven't had a chance to play with one yet.

One thing, however, has a lot of the Apple faithful scratching their heads: the new Macbooks no longer have FireWire (FW) ports. Not FW 400, not FW 800. Nada.

If you don't know what FireWire is, then I guess you may not miss it.

But the rest of us will miss:

• FireWire's speed vs. USB. With all other things being equal, a FireWire connection to an external hard drive is WAY faster than USB 2.0
• Migration assisant via FireWire. Upgrading a new Mac sure is a lot easier when you can just hook up your old one via FireWire, run Migration Assisant, and let your new Mac do all the work of bringing things over from the old system. Apple has updated the migration utility and supposedly it now works with USB, but see point number one regarding speed.
• Hooking up our video cameras to our Macbooks. If you've got a camcorder and its connection to your Mac is FireWire, you're out of luck. So if you're in the market for a new Macbook, you'll have to either skip the Macbook in favor of the more expensive Macbook Pro, or get a new camera that uses USB. Or stay put. This is the most aggravating problem with regard to dropping FW, especially considering that new Macbooks still come with iMovie. How do they expect people to get their footage from the camera into iMovie?! (Steve Jobs made the point that new cameras are dropping FireWire. C'mon Steve, we know that Apple wants to already be where the standard will be for everybody else a year or two down the road. But this move doesn't give anybody an alternative. At least when Apple dropped the floppy drive years ago (and people complained about that), you could get an external USB floppy drive if you really wanted one).
• Using audio gear with our Macbooks. I don't do this myself, but a lot of audio pros take Macbooks into the field because they're so small, light, and dependable. And Macbooks can run audio software such as Logic and Protools quite well. But guess what? A lot of that expensive hardware is FireWire based.

All of this points to why Mac fans are calling this one of the dumbest moves in a long time. Especially when you consider that Apple made FW famous - and that other computer manufacturers have been adding, not removing, FW. How embarassing for us now, when our Dell-toting friends can hook up their FireWire devices, but we can't. And for those with a substantial investment in FW hard drives and enclosures, I feel your pain.

I have yet to hear a good reason for dropping it from the Macbook. At least they could have made it optional; I'd pay an extra $25 for the FW port - which probably cost a buck to include in the first place.

There's an interesting thread about this on ars.technica, if you want to hear what others are saying about Macbooks sans FireWire.

Crossover - another Windows solution

Parallels and Fusion are great applications for running Windows programs on your Mac, but how about this:

There's also a way to run Windows programs on your Mac...without Windows!

It's called Crossover, and it's based on WINE technology. WINE is not the same thing as virtualization; it stands for "Wine Is Not an Emulator." I guess it doesn't matter to you or me what the technical distinctions are, really.

Anyways, Crossover is really handy for some of the same reasons Parallels or Fusion are handy - but in one regard, it's more handy. You don't have to boot an entire virtual operating system (XP or Vista, etc). You can launch just the Windows program. I use Crossover most for Internet Explorer - I can test web pages with it, and I find that certain Web sites (like our company's Outlook Web Access) work better in IE than anything on the Mac. For some reason, GoToMyPC works better using Internet Explorer, too - so much better, that this alone makes it worthwhile to me.

Below is a capture of my desktop, where I'm running Internet Explorer and Microsoft Publisher 2007 using Crossover. No Windows XP operating system is loaded, just the programs - which actually saves a good amount of RAM. I'm only using the RAM these programs would normally use, with no overhead for the OS.



Again, I could do the same thing using Parallels, and sometimes I do if I've already got Parallels loaded, but if I want to quickly just check my company's web mail system, IE is just a few seconds away.

Or maybe I couldn't do the same thing with Parallels. What if I no longer had a PC and no longer had a Windows XP installation CD, but I still had my Office 2003 discs and serials? I could still make use of them with CrossOver.

Now, Crossover is a little more "wild west" than Parallels or Fusion. It only supports certain Windows programs. You can try programs not on the official Crossover list, but you're on your own at that point and the good people at Crossover make no guarantees about their stability.

Some things are really, really hard to get working right in Crossover. It's hard to explain. If a program depends on certain Windows components aren't really there, then it could get hinky. I've had trouble getting network printers to work right with certain Windows programs running in Crossover. Another example would be updates, like Microsoft Office updates. Because the Microsoft updating system is so dependent on the operating system - which isn't there - you have to wait for the Crossover people to release their own versions of the updaters. I know, it can make your head spin.

But for quick and dirty Windows program work, this could be a nice thing to have in your bag of tricks. CrossOver's standard version costs $40.00.