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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."
Of course you do, keep using the mac you have right now.
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No one is really "raging". A few loudmouths (and it's always the same ones if you hang around those boards and wait long enough) are whining about not being able to plug cameras (that they don't own) into the new Macbook (which they also mostly don't own). This is bitching for bitching's sake, and I can show you. Look here:
The white macbook is still being sold in the Apple store, and will be for the foreseeable future, having just been made Apple's "cheap" notebook. And white macbooks still have firewire400. Which is exactly what these whiny people are screaming that they want.
It seems to me that a few very loud people quite badly aren't going to shut up until Jobs give each and every single one of them their own free, customized mac.
Apple and "low-cost or free" hardware? What have you been smoking?
Is firewire really outdated? ISA surely is, but last I checked, despite being not widely used outside the Macintosh scene, it's still feature-competitive.
Firewire is actually fairly common on even budget PC notebooks, including Dells, so this omission by Apple is all the more perplexing. And Apple still doesn't offer Blu-ray drives or 3G wireless at any price on any model. (No 3G wireless option from the iPhone company!) It also amazes me that their latest hardware refresh still caps RAM at 4G maximum. Even Dell has figured out how to go to 8G max on a notebook.
That said, there is some great design in these new MacBooks. But Apple engineers waxing eloquently about "unibody" construction (it isn't, by the way) when they forgot the damn Firewire port is a bit too much to stomach.
Sorry, Steve was right, most new if not all HD recorders are USB.
Hell, I could not tell what they whining was loudest about, the fire wire or that the base aluminum macbook doesn't have a back lit keyboard (no macbook before this offered that feature anyway)
Fact is, people feel the need to be a victim or otherwise justify a decision for them. In other words, instead of admitting they had no wish to buy the new one (or means to) they can not blame Apple for not doing it. Very nice and tidy and common practice on message boards world wide. Besides getting to portray themselves as the victim they can get a sense of belonging with a possibly valid aggrieved party. It is always easier if you can blame someone else, regardless of the truth.
Yeah, it would nice nice if Firewire was there. However Firewire has always been associated with "Professional" and it has become an artifact of days gone by. Apple sunk FW themselves when they pushed USB to the forefront on iMacs and even with iPods now.
You want firewire, its easy to get, but the PRO line. It is only $400 more to the bottom end of the Pro line from the top of the "consumer" mac line.
Frankly, the new MacBooks are great. Some of the best integrated graphics seen on an Apple laptop. In fact the 9400M series removes a major reason people always held over Apple's head for not buying one before.
The real fault with the 13" Macbook is the viewing angles and color reproduction of that panel are horrible. Really cheaped out. So if you want your firewire and a great display get a Pro. After all if your buying an Apple laptop for more than sitting around Starbucks to look cool you would have gotten the Pro and never bitched
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
Yeah but, unlike ISA>PCI, Firewire is actually BETTER than the only connection the new Macbooks offer (USB 2.0). It irks me because Firewire is still my choice for importing and exporting DV video. USB 2.0 just isn't up to snuff (not with the equipment I use, anyway).
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
But sadly, there is no BBQ. Apple pushed FW on us as a superior solution and championed it, encouraging us to adopt it. We do. Then they drop it, leaving us with a load of FW enabled devices. Is that not clear enough to you? Hence the outrage. HENCE!
- Zav - Imagine a Beowulf cluster of insensitive clods...
And yet Apple will still probably sell a metric assload of new MacBooks.
Saying that hundreds of users are pissed off just means there is a small but vocal minority who are annoyed.
The vast majority of MacBook users and potential buyers couldn't care less what FW is, and probably don't even know what it is.
As a number of commentators have pointed out, the vast majority of consumer grade video cameras now use USB. Seriously, if you don't like the product, don't buy it. Is it really that hard?
Paul Leader
Let's face it:
FireWire is on its way out due to USB's huge dominance... if it's not discontinued now, it will be eventually. It will join the ranks of all the other discontinued proprietary formats like Atari, Commodore, Amiga, VHS, Betamax, DivX, HD DVD, and so on.
FOX NEWS.com should be BANNED from television and internet. Have the Congress take it over and give us Truespeak.
Firewire is a "pro" standard. Apple included it on all older computers because at the time the USB 1 standard was worthless for anything but keyboards and mice. Apple was providing a convenient method of importing video from the cameras at that time.
Now, most of the consumer-level video cameras come with a USB connection, leaving the pro-sumer and pro cameras with firewire. Anyone who does any serious video editing is not going to do it on a MacBook. They will upgrade to the MBP. It sucks for all of us who still have perfectly good cameras and external drive enclosures with FireWire, but then again, I believe Apple is targeting the MacBook at *new* users who wouldn't necessarily be burdened with all the FireWire peripherals. They also need to differentiate the MB from the MBP in some meaningful way, otherwise very few will bother to pony up for the MBP - the MacBook is that good.
As far as the existing white MacBooks having it, it's already in their design and manufacturing process, Apple makes a good profit on them without changing the specs. I'll bet that next January we'll see Apple drop FireWire from the white MacBook, maybe make a few other cost-saving tweaks and roll it our at the $899 price-point, especially if the economy turns out to be hitting them harder then they are predicting.
The nice thing about the FireWire spec is that you don't need a computer to manage the transfers. This means we will be seeing more "adapters" with perhaps an intermediate HD in them that provide FireWire-in and USB/FW-out. Not a perfect solution, especially with Final Cut Pro set up to use time-coding for final imports of projects, but then again, if you've sprung for FCP, you're not going to do it on a MacBook and I'm sure USB cameras that are high-end enough to justify editing in FCP will be able to be accurately controlled over USB as well.
This still doesn't address target disk mode, but realistically I've only used that recently to migrate data from an older machine to a newer one. I'm sure there's a way with the migration assistant to use another method to make the transfer (if anybody knows, please reply). I have to admit, I'm typing this on a MacBook Air that I've had since day-one which has no firewire and have never needed target disk mode or to connect to any of my firewire drives. I really haven't missed it in spite of having a lot of FireWire devices (XL1 cameras, FCP, external drives, etc.) I use the Air for "everything else" and my tower for video editing where I can control the lighting, use a big monitor and be connected to my Drobo backup.
"terrorism" and "pedophilia" are the root passwords to the Constitution
USB is terrible for external hard drives. Transfer rates suck.
eSATA solves this problem, but the designers thought that hard drives should be powered by an A/C adapter. That, and it's pretty assinine to have an external port dedicated only to 1 class of peripherals.
Powered firewire ports are so nice. Only one cable needed.
Note, I'm saying this as someone who still uses both firewire audio gear (I have an M-Audio Firewire 410 unit) AND a Sony Digital 8 camcorder with firewire ... so I *do* get the need for the connector at times.
But still, I think all this "outrage" is overblown. For starters, firewire is a slowly dying standard. No, it's not dead yet - but it's been struggling for years. The music industry is the biggest proponent of it still, but they're always SLOW to adopt changes - so that shouldn't come as much of a surprise. (Remember when Windows XP was released, and for years afterwards, you still had big-name audio apps that only officially supported Win '95/'98? Look how long music synthesizer/workstation makers hung onto SCSI ports as the answer for attaching your CD/DVD-ROM drives and external storage. They only started moving to memory card slots and USB ports after they exhausted their list of drive makers willing to re-brand external SCSI drives for them!)
As for camcorders? Apple's iMovie '08 total rewrite should have been the first clue on that! The main reason it was done was to support "AVCHD" video formats, as used on all the cameras popping up with built-in hard drives or flash drive storage. All of these were using USB interfaces, which older iMovie versions didn't even recognize. Go to any retail store today, and count how many camcorders on sale still use firewire! I bet it's no more than 1 in 5, and would be even less if it weren't for Sony's clinging to firewire (i.link) on their products.
Apple is known for a rather "minimalist" attitude with their products, and will delete options any time they think one is getting "old in the tooth". They were the first to ditch the 3.5" floppy drive, and go to great lengths just to eliminate switches and buttons on their products (iPhone, iPods, their very basic wireless remote control, slot-loading drives on portables with no eject button to be found on them, etc. etc.).
Obviously, they recognize that true "Pro" type users (who generally earn an income from the work they do on their computer) could still need firewire, so it's there on the Macbook Pro. It's there on all currently shipping Mac Pros too, and at least for the time being, even on consumer iMacs. (But I bet it disappears off the next revision of those too.)
Bottom line? A lot of people just wanted to try to do things with Apple's cheaper "consumer focused" portable that go a little beyond what that core market would ever care to do with one. Apple pushed back, and is forcing you to choose a "Pro" version of their machine if you're doing "Pro" things with it. Either go along with this thinking, or don't -- and use a last generation notebook that you can pick up cheaper than ever right now. By the time IT wears out, firewire will be much less attractive an option for you anyway, I suspect.
That's SOOOO much easier than holding down some keys, plugging into a running computer and editing files.
Why is this flamebait? There are very few devices that actually use firewire, due to the massive success of USB. Macs can also be hooked to eachother (as can PCs and Linux boxes) via crossover ethernet, so the loss of firewire should really only translate, except in rare circumstances that ought to belong to the MNP market anyway, into lower production costs (lower sale cost would be nice, too, but lets not get too hopeful)
Not only that, but Macs usually have this nice little feature called "target disk mode". Basically, I can reboot my computer into target disk mode, and then it acts like an external hard drive through firewire. This can be very handy for troubleshooting, imaging, and repair.
The problem here is that USB doesn't support it. I don't know the technical details of why, but supposedly it's something that firewire can do because of something about the hardware spec or the protocols it uses, and whatever it is, USB doesn't have that, and you can't fix it with software. (from what I understand)
I'm going to miss having that option, though I'm not sure it's a deal-breaker for many people.
I think it a fair comparison to say that USB is to Firewire as IDE is to SCSI. SCSI is a clearly superior interface, using its resources far more efficiently, while IDE's strength is in being cheap. The same is true of Firewire vs. USB.
That said, unfortunately, sets up USB FTW (in the consumer market, at least), despite the fact that many of us (myself included) actively use Firewire.
Oh, and I'm not an Apple user. I was, however, using SCSI for many years until the price differential between SCSI and IDE just became too big to blow off.
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I'm REALLY glad you didn't use a sex analogy.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
No, FireWire is not coming back on MacBooks any more than it is coming back on iPods.
Look, back in the day on PCs, we had a different port for every single purpose. You plugged your modem into the "serial port", your printer into the "parallel port", your mouse into the "mouse" PS/2 port, your keyboard into the "keyboard" PS/2 port. If you wanted a scanner, you bought a SCSI card and then you plugged the scanner in there.
This sort of thing is lame, lame, lame. Many PC laptops are still sold like this with a profusion of weird ports. For a huge majority of users there is no reason to have more than one type of port for general-purpose peripherals. It's completely uneconomical to ship a consumer laptop with a port that will go unusued almost all of the time.
FireWire is technically great but due to some historical accidents it did not win the battle against USB2. Placing it on a consumer laptop so that a few musicians and the people using older DV cameras can save a few bucks is completely crazy. (I've seen people on Mac forums complain that this affects "millions" of users -- nonsense). It makes perfect sense for a pro line to have special connectors, and this is where FireWire will stay until Apple manages to kill it off.
I know that a bunch of Mac users have everything from FireWire external drives to FireWire webcams, especially since USB performance on PPC Macs was awful. This does not play into Apple's plans any more than users with SCSI scanners did back when Apple dropped SCSI.
I have seen the future, and it is inconvenient.
While new devices that use firewire might be rare, I have no intention of replacing my camcorder just because Apple says I should.
Clear, Dark Skies
Well then don't.
And I'm not going to stop using my Super VHS VCR just because JVC stopped making them, but it's fact that this standard I'm using is now obsolete and will eventually die.
FOX NEWS.com should be BANNED from television and internet. Have the Congress take it over and give us Truespeak.
But the firewire standard is not dead. It is used in all sorts of video, audio and hard disk devices. Nothing that remains works as well. Usually when they drop something, is because the replacement is better. In this case it is not true. The replacements are worse, or not useful at all.