Incidentally, if I remember right, the separate ports on the older MacBook Pro are not that separate and a test I saw measured performance reductions when both ports were used together!
Correct, the 'old' MBP is using one bus for both FW ports, I never got to run a harddrive and the A75 simultanously - which is more about power consumption, actually.
Using several ports for heavy data transfers is not a good idea in any configuration, though. It's your CPU which is doing the heavy lifting.
It's in french by everybody can understand graphics.
It seems that the USB2.0 of the new MBP is faster than the faster PC laptop on the market wich is a very good news for all of us which are shooting tethered.
The bad news is that the FW800 is not much faster that expected and quite similar in speed that USB2.0 the way it has been implemented.
That's old news, ever since USB 2.0 was introduced it was claimed it could beat Firewire.
It's working for consumer needs, but not for professional users when you need to move large amounts of data or work on pro video or audio.
If one does any of that, even FW 400 still runs circles around USB 2.0 .
Both 'Snow Leopard' and Adobe CS4 are supposed to take advantage of GPU power, so I'm wondering why Apple is leaving Firewire behind while there are still tons of FW harddrives and professional devices around which depend on it , and there is no real substitute available.
For pro users, the near-future advantages of the advanced graphics should be convincing enough to go MB'Pro', and we could still get a MacBook with Firewire to use it when the speed isn't an issue.
For 12+ years , Apple was my only choice, but right now I'm wondering if there is a future for professional users on a Mac - are they going all iPod/phone/etc. now ?