Apple have slipped their 13.3" Aluminium MacBooks up into the lower end of their Pro range, leaving the original white MacBook on it's own, perhaps to be joined by a friend at some point?

MacBook Pro page
MacBook page

Yay! FW800 and SD card slots in the Pro range!

Shame I can't afford to upgrade. It's going to be a stretch to get as far as a copy of Snow Leopard in September.

I'd love to see a 10" MacBook Air.

Mark

Are SD cards used by 'pros' though?

Mark

I don't know. Most compacts use them. I've a feeling most of the cheaper Nikon DSLRs use them, too.

*rushes to check facts*

Yep, it looks like most of the low- to mid-range Nikon DSLRs use SD type cards.

I know, but are they used by 'professionals'? *shrug*

Mark

Out of interest what do the others use, Compact Flash?

Yep, well, the upper pro models do.

Mark

Who can say?

Personally, I doubt it, but then do you support a card type used by only high end users, or support the card type used by about 95% of digital camera users?

Actually, the latest Canon DSLRs seem to be supporting SD over CF too.

Surely most proper pros use a card reader anyway. Being able to slot a card into the laptop itself saves a bit of effort.

You do neither and let the user buy their own card reader.
That card slot is something I'd never use, so I'm paying for redundant features (if I was to get one, which I'm not planning on doing).

Mark

I never used the PC card slot, or the replacement, so they've always been redundant features for me. An SD card slot would actually be more useful - especially as we now have a camera that uses that format card.

Still, one man's meat is another man's poison.

I see they have castrated the spec of the entry level 15" MBP, to get its price down...

CF out performs SD for cameras, the other half is a keen photographer. High end SD's can do about 30mbs whereas CF is 50% quicker at 45mbs.

SD's are more taileroed to the mid and low end range of cameras, I guess that's why the lower end models have SD. I'm a bit surprised they've ripped the expressCard slot out for the lower end as expressCard 2.0 spec is rated at approx 5Gbps. Very pleased I have an expressCard slot. If I want to use SD I will buy an adapter.

One thing on my list is to buy one of those expressCard slot storage jobby's. Encrypt it and use it for private data, and I can remove it and it wont stick out a mile. I hope.

The SD is also much thinner. CF and Express slots take up a lot of space. It could be a move towards thinning them down even more, in the future.

We use CF and SD here.

Also, just thought, the SD slot, being smaller and thinner, means that the slot is less susceptible to having things accidentally getting stuck in it and less of a dust magnet.

As a general rule the "Top End" Nikon DSLRs have a capacious frame buffer which means that you can usually take several "RAW" images (more JPEGs I guess) before the camera needs to write to the card. For most applications any of the souped-up versions of most popular formats are likely to be adequate. Some of their specialist models aimed at "Sports" photographers who want to blast off a lot of shots in very quick succession might require the higher bandwidth of the fastest CF cards, but otherwise I suspect its largely snobbery.

"Professionals" are generally unlikely to want to plug cards directly into their Laptops, but its possibly a good feature for we amateur snappers. Personally I download all my images via a desktop PC, though occasionally I use my Tablet and the facility to plug a card straight in might be useful once in a while.