Apple has good track record of ditching aging tech

You don't think that Apple looks for ways to kill off aging tech based on patent expiration do you?  Apple does what it does because it doesn't want other companies to be able to produce lower cost clones of their technology. 

Keep building new tech with new patents and kill off the old tech to eliminate competition.  This also forces software developers to keep up with writing their software for the new tech which further ensures the end of the old tech.  Who wants to be a software developer whose only offerings are for dead product lines.

Apple thinks their decisions about what tech should be in your laptop or desktop is more important than your decision about what should be in it, which is just one of many reasons I've never bought so much as an iTunes song from them.

And yet, my Mac Pro has more expansion space and is easier to maintain and upgrade than most average desktop PCs. I don't want to get in an OS war here (both Windows and Mac OS X have their respective advantages and disadvantages), but Apple's market share is rising, which is a fact, and can't be argued.

That's the joy of free will.  People are morons, so naturally when presented with the ability to be morons and buy a poorly designed PC, they do.  Of course, you pay a nice little 40% premium on anything but baseline systems for your pretty OS, so maybe you shouldn't use my theory.

I have a full size extended atx tower with a latching full side panel, front, rear and side panel ventilation, six small drive bays in latching cages, four large slide in drive bays, two more pop in case fan slots if I actually use six hard drives, four extra expansion slots, and plenty of room for the biggest workhorse of a cooling setup money can buy even on a dual processor board.  I put it together myself for half what an equivalent mac would have cost, and have done a full hardware changeout already for even less.

Mac only makes sense when you buy crappy computers, just like Dell only makes sense when you buy crappy computers.  Anything well above a baseline model will be significantly cheaper and probably superior if you put it together yourself.

Nope; FireWire is just Apple's brand name for their application if the IEEE 1394 standard.

Funny, that's almost exactly how I feel about Microsoft. Both Windows and Office have grown entirely too pushy (helpful) and bloated for my taste, and the firm seems very interested in a labor/skill analog to ditching old hardware techs--one way to explain the accursed ribbon is that when deployed in a workplace it instantly destroys hard-earned skill sets of folks who'd been growing steadily more efficient at using Office apps. That means you can let those higher-paid folks go b/c they now perform almost as badly as the fresh hires.

If anything, your argument should be that Macs cost too much. There's no basis for the fact that Macs are crappily built. And, just to clear this up, how customizable and upgradable they are has nothing to do with whether they are built well. Built well means that they don't break easily and have very little hardware problems, both of which any Mac owner will tell you is true. Of course, just like with PCs, Macs do have hardware problems.

What most PC users like you think is that Mac users believe their computers are perfect. That's not true for the majority of us. Macs have downsides just like Windows computers. For example, I like the way Windows handles networks more than the Mac way of doing it. Also, Macs don't have many popular videogames, although that's slowly changing with companies like Aspyr and CodeWeavers. But, in my opinion, Macs are generally well-buit, reliable machines with a good operating system and more-polished 3rd-party apps. Note how I said "in my opinion" and not "it's true and everybody who doesn't think so is an idiot".

Hmm...didn't realize this...might be a bad move on their part.  In the film industry are a lot of people with firewire connecting hardware that will not be too happy.

The serial port is a bit premature - as Net engineers are finding out.  Cisco has not gone to USB - yet.  Hard to console into a router with no serial port.  Possible yes. but the idiots buying the machines forget to include the USB to serial adapter.

With the way the film industry is heading, many of the cameras they are using are quickly moving into full HD. Firewire isn't really an addequet format anymore for transfering such large files.  I'm Curious to see what they bring out next.  Last time I had to convert Full HD it was through a USB 2.0 connection from a solid state disk off a sony EX1.  Took freeking forever!

Just my opinion here, I think firewire is dead.  My major issue with firewire is that if you unplug a camera from a firewire port with the camera powered on, you can mess up your camera.

Firewire.

Secondly, I think Firewire didn't work out like Apple hoped.

Then Stevey Jobsy saw that over at the PC market, USB 2.0 sucks balls.

So the turtleneck dude decided to take out firewire.  

Just my 2 cents [cannot be refunded]

I was looking at the tech specs on the new Mac Book....it still has a Firewire 800 connection.