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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).
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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.
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.
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.