[image title=”macbook3″ size=”medium” id=”647″ align=”right” linkto=”[site_url]/632/thoughts-from-a-single-digiter/macbook3″ ]Yesterday’s announcement of new MacBook Pros from Apple was not-so-warmly received by the post production community. The general specs were improved with more RAM, larger hard drives, and better quality displays. However, one big change in the 15″ flavor was the removal of the Express Card/34 slot, replacing it with an SD card slot. Phil Schiller mentioned that the reason for its removal was that the number of users who took advantage of the slot was in the single digits.

As one of those single digit users, I was looking to upgrade with the refresh of the MacBook Pro line. I won’t be now. I certainly understand their decision to cut costs by getting rid of something that wasn’t used by a vast number of their customers. But as one of their pro users, I’m on a 12 to 16 month upgrade cycle on hardware, so I would hazard a guess that I upgrade more often than many users. Isn’t that worth something?

In fairness, they did leave the slot on the 17″ MacBook Pro. On top of that, in the past Apple has certainly added back ports based upon feeback from users (hello, FW800). But for me personally, the lack of an Express Card/34 slot is a deal killer because I need it to do “pro” production in the field. Why is this and why am I ok to wait? Click through for more…

First off — what possible use would I have for the Express slot? A lot.

P2 Card Reading. We use the HVX200 for most of our production at fxguidetv and fxphd. Initially we used the Firestore, but for Chicago-based and remote production we’ve switched over to using higher capacity P2 cards and the Duel Adapter to load footage onto the MacBook Pro. Even though the files on the Firestore were native DVCPROHD QuickTime files, the time to Log and Transfer from the P2 card pretty much equals transferring over Firewire. Show floor coverage is so much easier using the internal P2 cards on the Firestore — and no worry about the connector dropping out and such. While it’s admittedly a bit buggy, using P2 cards is dramatically better for us at trade shows and while I’m traveling doing interviews as a one man crew.

eSATA Adapter. This is a huge one as well, because file transfer speeds are so much better in real-world situations than FireWire 800. We’ve been buying external hybrid disks now (RAID and non-RAID) with FW and eSATA connections. It really makes a difference.

CF and SD Card Reading. My MacBook Pro already has a card reader…one that is far more flexible than the SD-only version in the new