new imac g5

[Chris_Avakian]

those look pretty hot to me

[A.L.]

Yeah, but no firewire 800 nor any way to upgrade to one. Dumb tactic to get people to spend more for the towers / displays. Dumb for the consumer and dumb considering they're trying to make a FW800 a new standard.

[lutopia]

Yeah, but no firewire 800 nor any way to upgrade to one. Dumb tactic to get people to spend more for the towers / displays. Dumb for the consumer and dumb considering they're trying to make a FW800 a new standard.

Yeah, that does sound pretty dumb.

[Milkmansound]

I don't think its so dumb - this is a hot machine for the price point. Most people that get imacs (I think) are not going to need the 800 ports. I have never used an 800 port myself, and have had no problems. Then again, I hardly use firwire at all since I have a G4 with PCI slots - what they need to make (and maybe they already do) is a firewire PCI interface - ie, PCI slots that can be hooked into the firewire port on the machine. At the very least, you'd think the smaller machines would have PCMCIA...

[A.L.]

Well, ok. As a video guy I'm noticing consumer HD right around the corner and that nice new external RAID setup isn't going to be quite so hot-shit when you realize it's capped by the FW400. FW800 drives and peripherals are becoming increasingly more common. It's like the very first iMac which had no FW port at all. Within months everyone who bought one was screwed: no way to expand, no FW port, no simple DV video capturing functionality, no MOTU, no 002, cut off from an entire generation of storage expansion options, etc., etc.

I just think it's silly, and I feel sorry for the consumer. Maybe there are more serious technical 'behind the scenes' reasons that make it more expensive and complicated to impliment a FW800 port than I realize, but still...

ok, ok I'll stop