Tuesday, October 14, 2008

New Apple Notebooks confuse the lustful

Today Apple announced updates to the MacBook, MacBook Pro and MacBook Air. One of the areas of confusion is the new mini display port. Display Port is a new standard for connecting monitors. Apple's mini display port seems to be a derivative of this standard.

Apple released a new 24" LED Backlit Cinema Display that has a built in magsafe, usb and min display port adapter. A very nice solution for an owner of these new laptops. But what about the rest of us?

I would really like to see an adapter for DVI to mini Display port so I could connect my MacBook Pro to the new cinema display.

The other big question is mini display port to HDMI connectivity. The display port standard may be better than HDMI but an awful lot of TVs and monitors are shipping with HDMI and Apple needs to enable their laptops to connect to these monitors. This will be especially important if they update the Apple Mini to adopt the mini display port. I know a number of people, Dave Winer and Robert Scoble, included that have used the Apple Mini as the center of their entertainment systems, connecting them to large screen TVs via HDMI.

No doubt all of this confusion will be resolved over the next couple of weeks as the dust settles. If Apple doesn't release the necessary cables then hopefully third parties can step in to the breach and produce the necessary conversion cables. The end result may not be as pretty with daisy chained converters but hopefully it should work.

I carry my MacBook Pro with me everywhere and always carry a full set of DVI to various graphics interfaces - VGA, S-Video etc.

Apple I hope you are listening. The new Cinema Display looks great but don't cut it off from the loyal band of earlier Macbook and Mackbook Pro users. Let's have that DVI to mini display port cable so we can go buy the display as an interim step before we finally spring for a new MacBook or MacBook Pro.

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