With the announcement of a new line of Macbook and Macbook Pro laptops from Apple, I had to stop by the local Apple store and check them out.  From the website it looked like the Firewire port was missing from the entry level Macbook.  With video editing being such a large part of the iLife experience, I couldn’t believe this feature would be missing from a new product.  However, when I entered the store, my suspicions were confirmed, the Firewire port was indeed missing.  With all the thought that went into designing these new machines, it’s hard for me to believe Apple would leave this out.  Any video amateur or professional is now essentially forced into buying the $2k+ pro model if they want to plug in many digital video cameras.  After looking at the specs for both machines, it would seem the Firewire port is the largest differentiating factor now aside from size.  Apple’s even dropped the standard FW400 port on the Pro in favor of a single FW800 port.  This makes sense to me in that it seemed a bit redundant to have both.  Perhaps most Macbook users don’t use the FW400 port.  If so, this probably won’t turn out to be a problem.  I personally haven’t used mine except to hook up an external drive once, but if I ever wanted to get into video editing again it would certainly come in handy.  That said, the new Macbooks are quite a piece of engineering to behold.  Check out the video on the new Macbook site to see just how much went into its creation.