Slashdot Mirror
Users Rage Over Missing FireWire On New MacBooks
CWmike writes "Apple customers, unhappy that the company dropped FireWire from its new MacBook (not the Pro), are venting their frustrations on the company's support forum in hundreds of messages. Within minutes of Apple CEO Steve Jobs wrapping up a launch event in Cupertino, Calif., users started several threads to vent over the omission. 'Apple really screwed up with no FireWire port,' said Russ Tolman, who inaugurated a thread that by Thursday has collected more than 300 messages and been viewed over 8,000 times. 'No MacBook with [FireWire] — no new MacBook for me,' added Simon Meyer in a message posted yesterday. Several mentioned that FireWire's disappearance means that the new MacBooks could not be connected to other Macs using Target Disk Mode, and one noted that iMovie will have no way to connect to new MacBooks. Others pointed out that the previous-generation MacBook, which Apple is still selling at a reduced price of $999, includes a FireWire port. Apple introduced FireWire into its product lines in 1999 and championed the standard."
The complaint is because the Macbook makes all their firewire accesories useless. (Duh).
Check out Unsealed: Whispers of Wisdom! http://unsealed.k3rnel.net It's an action-RPG about Open Sourcerers.
They both have the same specifications, but the marathoner can keep it up much longer.
USB does it in bursts and firewire is continuous transfer - thats why its better for movies.
(Aren't you glad I didn't use a car analogy? :-))
A MacRumors article has a response from Steve about the lack of Firewire, with his only explanation being that, "All the new HD camcorders have been using USB for the last two years."
Sigh, I'm probably picking up a MBP, but I know plenty of folks that use firewire for things other than camcorders (particularly good external HDs)
I think that they wanted $0.25 per end-user. Other than licensing, Firewire is a more expensive technology to implement due the hardware. That's really kept it out of the low-end markets. USB is a decent technology for certain things like peripherals and general data transfers. Firewire supplies more power and is better in time-sensitive transfer applications. Overall, Firewire 400 which came out 1995 has a higher sustained transfer rate than USB 2.0 which came out in 2000.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
An external adapter would still require somewhere to plug into. The MacBook doesn't have an ExpressCard slot like the MBPro does.
The only ports available are 2xUSB2 and Gigabit Ethernet. USB2 can't keep up with FW400 (even though the theoretical max is slightly higher) and doesn't transfer in the realtime mode needed by DV cams. There is talk of Firewire over Ethernet, but there is no known compatible adapter.
If the Ethernet adapter in the MacBook supports this (but possibly not until Snow Leopard is released, then come out and say so now. That would likely shut a number of people up.
I was planning on switching to a MacBook because the video card in the old one wouldn't work properly with Blender (Apple's OpenGL problems, as the same card works with Win/Linux and Blender) ... but the lack of a FW400 port means I can't hook in my DV camera, and using iMovie/iDVD was one of the reasons to want to switch to a Mac to begin with.
Having to capture on another computer and then move the video to the Mac means having to have a system around specifically for when I want to capture. Not very elegant at all. Now, I'm thinking I'll probably get a ThinkPad.
My Firewire 400 external drives routinely kick the crap out of my USB2 external drivers when archiving large volumes of itty-bitty files.
If I remember correctly, USB2 is controllerless and requires CPU overhead and therefore the latency of USB2 sucks badly compared to FireWire (IEEE 1394x) with its controller and DMA (Direct Memory Access) channel.
This just makes sense if you have ever tried it.
FireWire 800 is even better than FireWire 400 for most anything and it is backward compatible. I believe it is much much faster than USB2 could ever hope to be and it is here NOW. (USB3 is still a LONG way off)
This is really about MONEY and Apple's either being greedy or cheap or both. Apparently they did this specifically on purpose as other 'new' models have FireWire... So, Why?
Apple is not wanting to pay the FireWire licensing fees and they are apparently wanting to push their user base into buying an affordable Hackintosh laptop (what many will likely do) or er.., will, uh... I mean Apple intends for their FireWire needing users to just pay many hundreds more for the "Pro" model that has FireWire.
As I understand it, there are also many cool things you can do with hard disk (and DVD and CD) 1-to-1 disk imaging with FireWire on the OSX macs too.. Not anymore. It's a Feature!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FireWire
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Serial_Bus
Seems like it would just be a lot cheaper to just add a FireWire CardBus 54 (PCIe) notebook controller card?
Assuming that you are refering to USB 2.0 and not 3.0, which isn't out yet, there are distinct advantages and disadvantages with Firewire. A standard Firewire bus is rated to 400 Mb/s, while USB 2.0 is rated to 450 Mb/s. However, the USB High Speed protocol with individual devices is limited to 400 Mb/s. In addition, the USB protocol has a lot more overhead when it comes to control of the bus. The entire USB bus is fully controlled by a single host computer, whereas Firewire is an intelligent bus that requires less overhead. What all of this generally amounts to is that when it comes to a single continuous data stream, Firewire still beats USB 2.0 by quite a bit. But when it comes to managing multiple devices, or transfering many small files, the differences are not so great. For external hard drives and digital video cameras, Firewire beats USB 2.0, especially if you run Firewire 800, which is capable of 800 Mb/s.
I see the glass as full with a FoS of 2.
the original macbook pros lacked a firewire 800 port, which was added to the next refresh on them. I expect to see a fw800 port added to the first refresh on these new macbooks.
Yes, no firewire sucks. I do mac repair work, and I use the firewire port a LOT. This is going to make it a lot harder for me to get my job done. I hate working on the slot load imacs that lack the firewire port.
I use to pity the PC service tech as he always had to disassemble machines and pull the HD out to work on certain things.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
If they're on the way to eventually eliminating Firewire I sure hope that Apple has plans to update USB support for more camcorders then.
I have a JVC hard drive camcorder that is USB and iMovie has absolutely no idea what to do with it when I plug it into any of my Macs. It seems thatt if I had chosen a camcorder with Firewire instead (which Apple themselves trumpeted as the thing to do) I'd have had no issues.
Nice.
I work for a major cable manufacturing company, which has made both the standard 6 pin firewire as well as 9 pin. what i do for this company specifically is make their catalog, and i can tell you that in our upcoming 2009 catalog we will not be offering 9 pin firewire at all, and our 6 pin stock selection has been greatly reduced. Obviously (to me) firewire is loosing in popularity (to usb) so get ready to upgrade your soon to be obsolete peripherals.
A couple of points:
DV cameras (and associated transports such as HDV, DVCPRO, etc.) actually operate at S100 (100mbps). It should be possible to construct an interface that lets these low-speed firewire devices operate over USB2. Plus, the protocols themselves are robust enough to deal with a bus problem. Older ibooks often had trouble keeping up capturing firewire video and they recovered just fine. An occasional hiccup shouldnt be a big deal.
I believe this is what apple or a third party vendor should do. It would be a VERY good product. There are readily available USB2 PCI bridge chipsets and PCI firewire chipsets. Such a product coould probably sell for around $100. While it wouldn't work very well for firewire hard drives, USB2 should be able to keep up with S100 if its the only demanding thing on the bus.
Secondly the IEEE1394c draft specifying an RJ45 connector is *not* Firewire over Ethernet. It's Firewire over UTP/Cat5e with some additional tricks that would allow ports to detect either standard and switch between gigabit ethernet and firewire as needed. I have been hoping for this standard to take off for a long time (It could be really neat in low end storage networks), but I'm not going to hold my breath.
Come on. With Target mode you can use you Mac as a HD anywhere, anytime, without opening the case. That's great for a lot of stuff, not just recovery.
Okay, Commodore/Amiga and Atari were companies not formats.
They produced closed-source operating systems and non-IBM-PC motherboards, but their machines actually used standard connectors and protocols for the most part. Commodore failed due to gross mismanagement (there's a hilarious/tragic book about it), not because they were particularly proprietary, and Amiga didn't really escape, becoming a suehappy I"P" holding company rather than producing real stuff.
I _agree_ that USB will/has basically killed firewire (that and the stupid firewire per-board licensing fee that OEMs had to pay that slowed takeup), but it is not directly comparable to the horrible zombification of the "official" amiga (unofficial amiga-like stuff is going strong - AROS is an AmigaOS-3-source-compatible open source operating system that runs on IBM-PCs, for instance).
I don't want to seem like an ass, but the fact that you are using M-Audio gear indicates to me that you're really not working "pro" audio interfaces (particularly on Mac, since the OS X support for M-Audio is awful).
While you are probably correct that Apple is further straying down the road of "consumer appliance" for their sub-2000$ computing devices and they can be served by USB2 ports, what it says to me even more is that Apple is happy abandoning some of the creative folks who are frequently the traditional standard bearers for OS X (video and audio creative folks). There's a lot of audio editing and composing, for example, that doesn't need a $2000 MBP.
But, as I said on Ars, that's fine. The audio folks will eventually just move to an alternate OS platform.
The vast majority of portable audio interfaces are firewire... because at this point there is no alternative. USB2 for audio pretty much sucks. All of the portable plugin hosts are firewire. It has nothing to do w/ "audio is slow to adopt to standards". Firewire is the proven low latency interface for audio.
Apple is being Apple... they try to force their users - being the fanboys they are - to shell out more money for the "Pro" series. So much for their 'warning' to the market about slimmer margins. I don't know where that was coming from or referring to.
If I didn't already have a huge amount of money invested in Mac audio software, I'd flee.
not in the audio world it isn't... try finding a multichannel professional usb sound card...
there are many differences between firewire and usb that make firewire far better for audio work (and video too, but that isn't my area) and it isn't just better speed (although that helps).
porl
Macs can also be hooked to eachother (as can PCs and Linux boxes) via crossover ethernet
Actually, Macs have NICs that can automatically detect crossed pairs in ethernet cables, so you don't even need a special crossover cable to connect two computers directly, as long as one of them is a Mac. Just a regular ethernet cable will do.
This is also the reason that a Mac will sometimes work when plugged into a wrongly-wired wall jack when all other computers fail.
Journey onward.
Actually, Macs have NICs that can automatically detect crossed pairs in ethernet cables, so you don't even need a special crossover cable to connect two computers directly, as long as one of them is a Mac.
Every Gigibit Ethernet NIC needs to be able to do that, it's not Mac-specific. It's required by the Gigabit Ethernet standard.
Exactly. FireWire is great for pumping high-bandwidth data like multiple audio streams (think mixing board) into the computer for processing. Firewire's biggest advantage is that it's designed to do all of this while bypassing the CPU as much as possible, freeing the CPU's cycles for audio effects processing. USB's theoretical speed is higher, but the architecture relies on the CPU to a much greater extent than FireWire.
Maybe we will get to the point soon where USB's CPU-intensive nature won't matter, but as someone who still occasionally overloads the USB input using only a MIDI controller, I can authoritatively say that we're not there yet.
Your brain is not a computer.
IEEE Std 802.3-2005 clause 40.4.4 Automatic MDI/MDI-X Configuration
Automatic MDI/MDI-X Configuration is intended to eliminate the need for crossover cables between similar devices. Implementation of an automatic MDI/MDI-X configuration is optional for 1000BASE-T devices. If an automatic configuration method is used, it shall comply with the following specifications...
I'm not an IEEE expert but the above appears fairly unambiguous. What I do know is that if it isn't required then you can be certain someone, somewhere omitted it. Heck, it would be found missing even if it were required. Crappy hardware abounds.
Lurking at the bottom of the gravity well, getting old
While new devices that use firewire might be rare, I have no intention of replacing my camcorder just because Apple says I should.
Apple is saying no such thing. It's so silly that people get worked up about a product that doesn't support their particular need, especially when there's an alternative product that does.
FireWire is only required for older DV cameras, some high-end video production equipment, certain musical equipment, target disk mode, and certain aerospace applications which really have nothing to do with personal computers.
1. Older DV cameras (dwindling market) - Get a new one, or don't get a new MacBook. If you still want a Mac, there are both cheaper and more expensive Macs that will do what you need. However, if you are thinking of buying a MacBook Pro just for FireWire, and would actually prefer a smaller screen, you can buy a MacBook and a new video camera for the same or less than a MacBook Pro.
2. High-end video equipment (niche market) - tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars in video equipment, with the level of income that goes with it, and you can't afford a MacBook Pro?
3. Musical equipment (niche, but potentially low-end market) - This is really the best case for FireWire on the non-high end MacBooks, and it's still pretty lame. It's an extremely niche market, and it's silly to cater to them at the expense of the average person on the specific model targeted directly at mass consumer.
4. TDM (not niche, but relatively geeky) - The hard drives are insanely easy to get to. A $20 enclosure and an extra 10 minutes tops.
5. Aerospace - Added for completeness.
The mass market has moved to USB. The MacBook is the mass market Mac notebook. You can still buy a higher end, and even a lower end Mac notebook with FireWire.
This does not signal the end of FireWire on Macs. It just signals the end of FireWire as standard on all Macs. If you want both a Mac and FireWire, there are still, and will be for some time to come, plenty of options.