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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."
Now I won't have anywhere to hookup my HD-DVD drive!
Because they couldn't afford the royalty fees for using the technology? Just kidding.... but do you all remember what the original royalty fees that Apple demanded before they were forced to tone it down?
Yeah, I'm fucking bullshit about that. Not going to buy another MacBook until they put it back.
I've got a crapload of external drives, many of which are firewire only. Pisses me off that apple drops their own widely used standard on their own equipment.
Assmonkeys.
- Zav - Imagine a Beowulf cluster of insensitive clods...
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.
Hey look, I can generalize too!
The person who mindlessly criticizes Mac fans is the same person who cannot open his mouth without looking like an ass.
If you mod me Overrated, you are admitting that you have no penis.
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? :-))
we mac folks like firewire because it's a constant 400 Mbs. Unless I'm mistaken (which is possible) USB 2.0's 480 is split among all the devices on the bus. So, the firewire 400 would give better performance for the transfer of large files.
read my comics, please, at http://www.funfactorycomic.com
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.
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)
Nobody but Apple uses it anyway--I think they're just surrendering to the inevitable here...
"Not an actor, but he plays one on TV."
1) Think different (r) 2) Target Disk Mode, for example. This is a real feature instead of 1) 3) Existing hardware which can only be used with FireWire (e.g. audio/video-equipment)
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?
(Aren't you glad I didn't use a car analogy? :-))
No. You suck. I hate you.
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.
Macbook = Consumer laptop
Macbook Pro = Better than consumer laptop
If you need to do particular work, you buy the tool best associated to do the job.
I wouldn't hammer a nail in with a screwdriver.
I wouldn't buy a point-and-shoot POS over a SLR if I was a newspaper photographer.
I wouldn't get a Macbook if I needed to do any kind of video editing.
Also, the Macbook screen sucks: http://cache.gawker.com/assets/images/gizmodo/2008/10/IMG_4649.jpg
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.
You can just plug a firewire card in to the expresscard sl... oh wait
--- Do you believe in the day?
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.
Quite simply they needed a way to sell more MacBook Pros.
The average audio/video hobbyist/artist is not going to shell out 2 grand for a firewire port so they can record their music and capture their video.
Speed isn't the issue, at least for me.
USB doesn't let you use the Mac in Target mode, turning it into an HD without needing any OS to boot. It's great for system recovery.
but a Mac without Firewire is like a shark without fins - menacing, but no real danger.
you mean, like a shark with no teeth..... right?
(a shark with fins, but no teeth will be menacing, but no real danger)
Have a nice day!
What does the Robotech Defense Force have to do with this? Are you Rick Hunter in disguise?
My Dell XPS laptop has a Firewire (IEEE-1394) port on it. I've NEVER used it.
The world has chosen USB for just about everything.
You can't make a USB target disk mode unless you either violate the USB standard and sell special Type A to Type A USB cables or you install a USB Type B connector in the laptops.
I see the glass as full with a FoS of 2.
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.
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
Firewire is absolutely key when recording audio (in my case, guitar, bass, vocals, etc). USB pushes the CPU too hard and doesn't leave it free for realtime sound processing - amp simulation, etc. Currently I'm doing it on a 2 year old MacBook, but at this point my only upgrade option is a MBP. After factoring in the cost of replacing my Firewire hardware, the MBP isn't much more expensive anyway.
Then again, I guess that's what Apple wants.
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.
Maybe you don't need up-to-date equipment. Some of us do. Especially when more processor and disk speed, and more RAM, translate directly into more money.
For example, until laptops with 4GB RAM were reasonably available -- which first happened in 2007 -- I couldn't run two OSes at once without lots of unproductive swapping.
Beyond work, I like to be able to view current websites with reasonable speed. Much 2005 hardware won't do that anymore -- let alone 2002 hardware.
And today's features are useful too. I enjoy USB 2.0 and my MagSafe adapter. I don't think my purchase of machines in 2006 and 2008, both of which I still own, was wasteful at all -- especially since the machines they replaced are all being used by new owners.
If I didn't replace a system until it stopped working, I would be using a Mac Plus; my Mac Plus still works.
You've crossed the line from environmental awareness to punitive, pointless asceticism.
For consumers, BETA tapes are a dead standard. But I'm sitting here surrounded by BETA tapes from major national networks and advertising agencies.
When an industry settles on a standard, don't expect a replacement for 20-30 years. The video and audio industry expects to use firewire for at least another 10 years. By eliminating firewire from the low end laptops, Apple is imposing a "pro" tax on the A/V production industry. Considering we already pay a premium over comparable PC equipment, Apple is going to see switchers going the wrong way for this decision.
I realize that video recorders and many other devices are still predominantly firewire. But for most external drives and even still cameras, USB reigns supreme and is about as fast. Probably Apple's view is that if you're into video editing, you ought to be paying the big bucks for the privilege of using firewire on a top-of-the-line machine.
Does not Apple support target-mode with USB these days? It seems like it should be possible for Apple to make the device appear as a USB mass storage device.
"Yeah, I'm fucking bullshit about that."
I believe you used the wrong metaphor there. You should have used "apeshit"
apeshit = animated with rage
bullshit = expression of astonishment, or declaration of falsehoods.
horseshit = also a declaration of falsehoods
batshit = crazy
dogshit = indication of subpar behavior or characteristics. "My Yaris is dogshit slow with a body in the trunk"
gooseshit = excessive coolness - this comes roundabout from the way one slips on goose droppings and the slang word slick=cool "That Aptera EV is slicker than gooseshit!"
I'm sure there are many others, this is just short list I came up with quickly to illustrate.
More music, fewer hits
No, it's the other way around. A shark with fins but no teeth can still get to you and possibly injure you just with its jaw strength.
A shark with teeth but no fins can't really move and I believe will drown before too long. So it can't get to you at all, but those teeth still look pretty scary.
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
Apple drops support for X feature on a whim. How about PowerPC chips? How about MacOS 9? How about my Newton?
print $open-source-rant
The great thing about relying on a simple company is your at their mercy. You KNOW that Asus or MSI would throw a Firewire port in if they were competing with apple (and could run OS/X).
USB doesn't let you use the Mac in Target mode, turning it into an HD without needing any OS to boot. It's great for system recovery.
On the new MacBooks, you can remove the hard drive very, very easily. So if you are into repairing computers, just get an adapter that lets you plug in a naked hard drive (I found them for around £25). Apart from that, Time Machine is the end user's friend.
You know, it's obvious there's no magic converter to go from USB to Firewire in all possible configurations, but it doesn't mean you couldn't make application-specific dongles.
Potential cases:
- you could have a small microcontroller convert SBP-2 (the Firewire disk protocol) to USB Mass Storage class and vice versa
- you could have a small microcontroller read a DV stream and pump out a UVC (USB Video Class) stream
Seems like there's suddenly a market for such things that didn't exist before; and a shitton of potential money to be made...
If you're going to be doing video editing, why aren't you using the MacBook Pro already?
The same way we did video editing when we had 800 mhz processors, only faster. Unless you are doing a lot of editing, the vanilla Macbook is just fine for doing video.
And if you want to give me the "I want to edit video on the road" bit, well then I ask you how long is that battery going to last working with big video files?
So you use the power adapter?
But how many mainstream users actually use target disk on a regular basis, if ever.
It's invaluable when imaging machines.
When I buy one of the new ones, I'll appreciate not having to pay extra for a feature I'll never use.
And saving what, two bucks in the process? Leaving Firewire off of the Macbook Air made sense, because they were going for a bare bones system. It doesn't make sense for the rest of their line.
Now, that said, this story is nothing more than another hand out to anti-Apple concern trolls. If you need firewire in a laptop, get the old Macbook or a Pro.
Apple adopted FW400 before it was standard. We had to convert SONY 4pin to 6 pin Apple FW with power. It was inconvenient and criticized at the time - we wanted SCSI on every new Mac. ( Barbaric!) USB is fine, bootable, and reasonably fast. google the $8 FW 400 to 800 adapter if you need to connect FW 400 devices. The whole point in a UNIBODY design was to lower cost, price, and number of parts to make stronger, lighter, cheaper, thinner, better Macs. Steve is a design minimalist ( see one button mouse controversy) Now Steve eliminated even the ONE button. By this line of reason, you'd also have a floppy, SCSI, serial, card readers, PS2, and have another giant, ugly, PC which is heavier, messy, thick, more expensive, and relies on past technology instead of looking ahead. How do you think Apple can afford a glass multitouch trackpad with gestures, at the same pricepoint? Yes, this saves Apple money, and customers, and allows Apple an edge against EVERY PC company. Technology is always outdating old technologies. True Windows still has DOS - but Apple is all about the consumer not corporate cheapos with zero profit margins. Less ports also looks sexy, is less overwhelming & confusing for your parents who spend hours looking at all those ports trying to find the right one. This is nothing new, and there is a whole dog & pony show video explaining unibody as a logical choice for the rapidly growing notebook market.
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.
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.
That's SOOOO much easier than holding down some keys, plugging into a running computer and editing files.
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.
That article is poor. A 17" screen vs 15" screen and different video cards with significantly different performance make the comparison invalid. They also inflated the price by choosing the 80W battery option and the "Ultrasharp" version of the monitor. Plus you need to pay another few hundred dollars for the AppleCare warranty to bring it up to par with Dell's warranty. Poor indeed.
We've all known from day one that USB was being pushed by Intel, against rival IEEE-1394 (aka fire-wire, aka iLink, etc.).
We also knew that fire-wire would eventually go away the day Apple said they were switching to Intel CPUs.
(this has been signaled, as we've seen Apple release patch after patch that tended to introduce more fire-wire problems than they fixed; Apples priorities were evident. Who did not know we weren't witnessing a gradual phase-out? Probably the nicest and most gradual in the history of Apple.)
We're all aware that fire-wire is faster, we're all aware that fire-wire lets you do cool stuff that USB can't even dream about, and we all know that USB needs to be arbitrated by the host's CPU (which is why Intel supports it: USB performs better; overall when you have a faster CPU - so USB increases demand for Intel's flagship products - duh. No brainer. No wonder Intel wants people to use a keyboard/mouse interface for heavy data transfers).
From day one of the PC-age, crappy inferior technology has ALWAYS won-out over superior technology.
So. . . um, duh?
Whine all you want. Be happy that fire-wire was cool, and it was around for a long time.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
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.
www.wavefront-av.com
Mac is not a platform for choice. You have 1 hardware manufacturer that can legally ship the OS. You can't complain when that 1 manufacturer makes a decision you don't agree with -- thats the nature of being locked in to one company. Thats not necessarily a knock on Apple, they make high quality products because of it.
Hey, you can bet I'm still pissed about the iMac, with their switch from ADB to USB, making my WACOM tablet obsolete.
(in fact, the fucker's still working JUST FINE on my beige G3 - wish I could connect this $600 monstrosity to my Pro.)
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
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.
People complaining about the lack of a FireWire port on the new macbook are a bit stupid. If you want choices in what features your hardware has, buying Macs doesn't make sense at all. Don't get me wrong, OS X is great. But is it worth having no choices? XP has been rock-solid stable for years, and if you buy a ThinkPad (for example) you have the following options that Apple does not offer on any of their new laptops:
Matte screens
Hi-res screens
BluRay
2 hard drives installed
VGA or DVI output without an adapter
A quality keyboard (yeah, I said it)
Actual mouse buttons
TrackPoint style navigation
Fingerprint Reader
Built-in 3G/WWAN networking
Built-in Wireless USB
Tablets (x61t, x200t)
Subnotebooks (12" x200 models, etc.)
Hotswap between 2nd hard disk, dvd-rom, bluray devices
The list is pretty huge. Point is, there are a TON of very worthwhile hardware features that you can't get on the new Mac laptops. How relevant is the OS at this point anyway? Start thinking about functionality more than design aesthetics.
No, that's very true. M-Audio gear is "prosumer" grade, at best. I'm not a professional audio engineer or musician. It's a hobby for me. I used to play rhythm guitar in a local band, but that was over a decade ago - and was really just a "phase" for me. I still like tinkering with music though. (Every time I've decided to just sell off all my music gear, it seems like a buddy comes along and wants to "jam" on some Saturday evening or what-not, and I get the urge to buy some stuff back again. So I've learned that "once a musician, always a musician" saying has some truth behind it. I just keep my instruments now....)
What I meant in my original post, though, was -- one can loosely describe Apple's definition of a "pro user" as anyone who is an "enthusiast", "power user" or earns money with what they do with their computer. If you really don't fall into any of these categories, and just want a cheap notebook because it's needed for a few music things you do (say, maintaining a tone library for your Line 6 guitar processor or something?), why are you fixated on buying a "latest and greatest" Macbook revision anyway?
Plus FW allows daisy-chaining of devices; and IMO performs better during multiple large file transfers. Eg I can play my music at the same time as editing DV and backing up data from one device to another: my Mac takes no CPU hit and the FW keeps the data flow smooth so nothing stutters or locks up. I love FW.
As for the "There's only *one* FW 800 port on the MBP!" complaints: you can daisy-chain; and you can also connect FW400 devices to a FW800 port with the appropriate cable - so I don't think it's an issue.
I really hope that the next iteration of the Mac Mini still has FW.
Those are quite expensive cameras; people who have those also have MBPs. Cameras under $2000 (AVCHD) all use USB.
The fact is that almost all other laptops within (and below) that price range have a firewire port (as well as 3 USB ports, card readers, etc.) - and for people like myself who are in the market to buy a new laptop and who would LOVE to own a Macbook (but don't have $2000), and who also like to use their computers, even occasionally, for audio recording, the new Macbook is completely unusable, since USB sucks for that.
If Apple's competitors can include firewire with a $1000 laptop, why should I be forced to pay $2000 for a comparable Apple product?
I still use SCSI for my Bernoulli drive.
I see the glass as full with a FoS of 2.
The loss of Target Disk Mode is a big deal. I've used it to retrieve data from laptops with a bad display or bad logic board and wipe the disk of those laptops before taking them in to be repaired. I've also used it to install Tiger (OSX 10.4) on G3 iMacs which didn't have a DVD drive.
Wansu, th' chinese sailor
Yeah I just don't get why... My 386 with Lotus 123 can makes my tax reports just fine, thank you.
Of Code And Men
It seems simple. Apple is phasing-out FireWire 400, as it is on about even-footing with USB 2.0 and can't compete. It is keeping FireWire 800, but treating it (correctly) as a pro feature. That means it is only on the MacBook Pro.
My Photography - http://ian-x.com
The Deathlings (comic) - http://thedeathlings.com
Hey, you can bet I'm still pissed about the iMac, with their switch from ADB to USB, making my WACOM tablet obsolete.
(in fact, the fucker's still working JUST FINE on my beige G3 - wish I could connect this $600 monstrosity to my Pro.)
Will it not work with a USB to ADB adapter like this? $39 doesn't seem like a bad price to possibly rescue a $600 device.
Putting moderation advice in your
'Cuz when he said "when they already have a working computer is a mystery to me" obviously he meant "when your computer doesn't work"... amirite?
Browse at -1 to keep an eye out for abuses.
BTW, many people don't know that Target Disk mode *also* gives the host Mac access to whatever is in the target Mac's optical drive. Very handy for certain tasks.
http://macworld.com/article/57005/2007/03/tdmoptical.html
Target disk mode won't happen with USB, the protocol has no support for peer to peer connections or multiple hosts on a single bus, or even no hosts on the bus.
If you never "got" the advantages of FireWire, or just want to connect external HD's & webcams you're not really going to miss it.
However, some FireWire advantages over USB include:
Target Disk Mode on Macs
FireWire can be daisy chained
Bus Power - FW - Up to 30V/45W vs USB 5V/500mA
Peer to Peer Connections (no host or CPU required)
Multiple Host on a bus support
TCP/IP Networking support
Distance FW800 = 100 Meters USB = 5 Meters
No Drivers Required (config ROM built in) aka Plug n Play
Remote Control of devices like cameras
CableTV Box Support
Firewire allows two operating modes. One is asynchronous, like USB which suffers from latency, bus contention and collisions.
The other is isochronous mode, and it lets a device carve out a certain dedicated amount of bandwidth that other devices can't touch. It gets a certain number of time slices each second all its own. The advantages for audio/video should be obvious: that stream of data can just keep on flowing, and as long as there isn't more bandwidth demand than the wire can handle, nothing will interfere with it. No collisions, no glitches.
From a practical perspective, this also makes it safer to send a lot more audio via Firewire. That's why most of the multichannel interfaces (16-24 channel) are Firewire devices, while USB devices are used for a two-channel stereo signal.
Nope. I just bought a Canon Vixia HV30, a very popular HDV camera, and my mac won't recognize it when I plug it in via USB. The USB port is only for grabbing photos off of the memory card and using it as a webcam. To capture footage in iMovie or final cut, to control the tape deck transport, or to print to tape, apple's own software requires firewire. I think this is a huge mistake on Apple's part.
LiveCDs in concept should work fine; Apple certainly hasn't disabled them to my knowledge - you can definitely boot from arbitrary media. The OS X install DVD is bootable and has disk tools, also.
However, there just aren't a plethora of available CDs for your average user to download and run. According to Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_LiveDistros#Mac_OS-based
There's BootCD which doesn't support anything about 10.3
OSx86 (for Hackintosh's) supposedly has some LiveCDs, which I would presume also work on a real mac.
It's not exactly legal for someone to mangle OS X onto a liveDVD, so there's not the zillion options Linux users have.
I'm pretty sure if you had a Linux/BSD LiveCD that supported the hardware and supported the filesystem, it'd work fine.
But 'fine' still wouldn't include, for instance, being able to run OS X executables. All of that is still a ton of work.
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And while it has its own advantages (not needing another machine) even a totally working liveCD is in some ways NOT as cool as Target Disk. In Target Disk you can run arbitrary applications etc from EITHER disk in most cases, and those applications can have access to writable space on the host machine. You can ALSO do things like install from DVD media to a machine that only has a CD - put the DVD in your newer machine, hook the older one up as a target disk, and install like any other external media.
With a liveDVD you didn't personally make, you ALSO have the problem that whatever other info you're trying to deal with isn't there. (Like the tool you just downloaded to fix today's problem.) So you have to deal with that stuff over the network, I suppose...
Of course Target Disk Mode is ALSO a solution to having a permanently broken ethernet adapter and backing up your info before you replace the MB - you can transfer all the files via TD. TD is just extremely convenient.
*****
With all that said, though... I can get behind their decision to remove the hardware to trim costs. I think the MB SHOULD try to trim costs. I think the lack of TD sucks right now... and I hope they make up for it in software.
Specifically, I hope that they will make it so at the very least you can - with Mac like ease and using Apple-provided media that you are allowed to add tools to, boot without the disk, make a proper network connection, and have AFP sharing in any direction you want with complete access to the disk.
Looking for freelance Actionscript (Flash/Flex) or ColdFusion work and/or freelance developers. Email me, put Slashdot
1) People use firewire?
2) People use the base MacBook for video editing?
3) People use firewire?!?
The debate was over once the performance difference between SCSI and ATA wasn't big enough to justify the additional cost
Have you ever actually compared the difference between sata and sas systems? It has a much larger effect on responsiveness than going from a 2GHz to 3GHz CPU. Almost all of our systems use SCSI or SAS drives.
It's the CPU difference which really matters. A decent SCSI system will sit at 80-100% utilised and the CPU will be close to idle. My personal desktop system. 15k RPM SAS drives. Waiting for computers is boring.
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Getting music equipment manufacturers to adopt standards has always been an exercise in cat-herding. My studio is quite modest, and almost every piece of gear has some interface unique to itself. The sampler has SCSI, the controller keyboard has USB, the audio interface has FireWire, the Roland module has the R-Bus connection that not even Roland uses anymore, there's a synth with a "to-host" serial port.
About the only standard that everyone can agree upon is MIDI (which was adopted jointly by the two heavy-hitter manufacturers back in the day) which is why everything still has a MIDI in and out 25 years later. There are some products that use Ethernet, for example the Muse Receptor, but I think the problem is that nobody wants to adopt a new standard until they're sure everyone else has adopted it, or else it's a wasted investment. I've believed for quite some time now that the major hardware manufacturers need to settle on some kind of MIDI-for-the-21st century specification, but perhaps it's a moot point now as people turn more towards software tools for audio synthesis and production.
USB doesn't allow for devices to communicate peer-to-peer. There is always a HOST and devices. Most USB devices can't switch from being a USB host to a USB device and vice-versa.
USB OTG(on-the-go) can allow devices to act as hosts, but this requires a USB controller that supports it.
IEEE 1394 is peer-to-peer. It requires nothing additional to use "target disk mode".