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Next-Gen Apples To Include 1394b, USB 2.0
seletz writes: "According to this article on The Register, Apple will ship its next-generation PowerMacs with USB 2.0 and double FireWire.
USB 2.0 boosts data transfer up to 480Mbps, FireWire 1394b goes up to 3.2Gbps." It may seem a minor point, but the more and faster connections are built in, the less frequently the upgrade gremlins have to strike. 3.2Gbps!
[sigh] This is a borderline troll, and I probably shouldn't waste my time replying to it, but on the off-chance it's legitimate, I'll make an honest answer.
The "massive Apple layoffs" thing seems to be a massive rumor, and no more. In fact, all the legitimate news indicates that Apple is weathering the storm much better than PC makers such as Dell. If someone has information to the contrary, please let me know.
And where the hell were you pricing laptops (and if so, why were you looking at iMacs anyway?) IMO the iBook offers the absolute best price-performance ratio of any laptop on the market. Yes, the standard 64 MB RAM sucks, but you can bump that up cheaply enough. In every other way, the iBook is the best low- to mid-range laptop you'll find for your money.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
Yes, it's most likely that Apples next revision of hardware will include USB 2.0 and IEEE 1394b (Firewire 2.0?). However, 3.2Gbs is not the number.
The next step for Firewire is actually 800Mbs. 1.2Gbs, 2.8Gbs and 3.2Gbs speeds are possible with this new protocol though, given the use of copper and fiber for the physical connection.
What I find more interesting, though, is that the next revision of PowerMac should sport some form of DDR SDRAM... and either the new "Apollo" G4 at around 1.2GHz or the brand new 64bit capable G5! Both Bandwidth Hungry CPUs... that should give the P4 and Palomino (?) a run for their money.
RSN
I remember seeing a Compaq DeskPro with USB on the logic board in early or mid 1997.
Who had the hardware first is irrelevant. Until Windows 98 added functional USB support (Win95 OSR2 does not count because its USB support was half-assed crap), those USB ports were little more than extra holes in the backplate. And aren't DeskPros aimed at the corporate market anyway, where (since NT is the "recommended" OS) USB was unusable until Windows 2000 was released in 1999?
Even with the USB support that came with Windows 98, Wintel users still hung on to those serial and parallel port devices for their dear little lives. Apple was the first company to fully support USB, which it did by producing a product that exclusively used USB to connect peripherals-- and that is what created the market for USB.
You can argue that forcing people to replace their legacy devices or buy adapters so they can continue to use them kind of sucks, but it is a tactic that is sometimes necessary. For example, to make sure people used the mouse on the first Macintosh, its keyboard had no cursor keys, so they couldn't stick with the 'old' ways. Once the mouse became accepted and it was shown that cursor keys still had a useful place on the keyboard, they were reinstated on the keyboards of subsequent Mac models.
~Philly