Apple didn’t disappoint again this year as the company unveiled the 17-inch MacBook Pro at the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) in Las Vegas, Nevada. Apple’s booth was lined daily from one side to the other with onlookers scouting out the MacBook and the company’s professional software editing suite, Final Cut Studio.
It was hard to tell if people’s initial interest was in Apple’s Intel-based Macs or in Final Cut Studio, but Apple said it came down to the interaction between the two that customers were looking for.
“The sum is greater than the parts,” Richard Kerris, Apple’s director of Technical Marketing for the Pro Applications, told Macworld. When you take the universal version of Final Cut Studio and put it on the most powerful laptop on the planet, you are going to get things done. People are seeing video manipulated at desktop computer speeds, but we’re using MacBook Pros.”
This is important to many of Apple’s broadcast customers, Kerris explained, because more of these people are working directly with media in the field. With faster laptops, they are able to do their editing quickly and get shots back to the studio.
Apple was so confident in the ability of the MacBook Pro, they decided to run all of their booth demos using the new computer. Not only were they running Final Cut Studio, which is a demanding application itself, they were also running Shake, Apple’s high-end compositing software on the MacBooks.
“One of the things that had a big impact for us at the booth was the fact we were running Shake on a MacBook Pro,” said Kerris.
While HD was the clear theme of NAB again this year, Kerris said Apple had a lot of interest in many different ways of getting media to the consumer, including podcasting. Kerris noted that 7 out of the top 10 podcasts on iTunes this week included video.