I second your dislikes about the MacBook and MacBook Pro (i.e. glossy screens only, no FireWire on the MacBook).
Back in the 90s, it seemed that finally matte displays “won” the war on the CRT front, now users need to fight again… Well, as CRTs are curved (either they are a sphere segment or, in case of the Sony Trinitrons and alikes, a cylinder segment), reflections are worse than those on a flat screen; nevertheless, I like my matte MBP screen and would like to have one on my next.

As for FireWire, I really can’t understand why Apple left it out of the MacBook; as there’s no ExpressCard slot either, there’s no way to add FireWire that way (I guess the MB is the only notebook in its class without an ExpressCard slot?). I’d still prefer a FireWire interface, though. As a guy in a German forum put it: “You either get a belt and suspenders or neither”.

@Bruce: At least in Germany (and I guess all over Europe) parts that are user accessable on a device (in this case the MB or MBP) such as memory, battery, and the hard drive don’t void the warranty if exchanged. That said, in a warranty case, I would always reinstall the original parts if it needs to be sent back to Apple (this way, you can also check if one of the substitute parts is flaky).

Best regards, Bernd

Hi Adam,

the name of the sparse backup file of time machine is consisting of the Mac Volume Name and the MAC address (example: MyMac_0018b31184dd). So potentialy just renaming the backup file using the MAC address of the new machine should convince time machine to accept the old backup volume.

Greetings
Andreas

Seems like a strange policy to me. Especially when access and upgrading the hard drive is so simple. Anyway, it stopped me from making the purchase. Not too happy about that.