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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!
The complaint is because the Macbook makes all their firewire accesories useless. (Duh).
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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.
Fuck Yeah! Like, do you know how many ISA cards I have sitting in a box at home?
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
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? :-))
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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...
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.
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.
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
I have a Dell laptop which cost £399 (which I think is approximately $60,000 USD) which has Firewire. I'm sure they could have managed it on a Mac that costs almost three times as much.
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
The criterion used to determine whether a technology is outdated is not how long it has been around or if other technologies are superior. The single criterion used is whether the technology is still NEEDED--that is to say, no other reasonable alternative, either economically or technologically, exists.
Since FireWire (IEEE 1394) is a commonly used interface for external HDs, and more importantly, DV cameras, and iMovie uses this interface to read digital video from such a camera, it is still necessary because the loss of the interface means significant functionality is lost. USB is not an adequate replacement for this purpose, and the same is true for Target Disk Mode (otherwise Apple would have implemented it over USB but that has clearly not come to pass). Therefore FireWire is not outdated.
That is it not widely used outside the Mac market is irrelevant. The MacBook used to be able to do at least two things (as described above) that many users consider important, that the newest iteration cannot. Moreover, there is no known workaround, no effort by Apple to find a reasonable alternative. That is why so many are upset. I personally believe it reflects a poor design and planning choice. The MacBook is not the MacBook Air. It is the entry-level laptop, some users' only machine. Many of them are educational users.
FWIW I own a MacBook Pro. I personally think 13" is too small and wouldn't get a MacBook anyway. But should Apple ever get rid of FireWire across the entire laptop line (without furnishing a viable alternative), I think you'd have a reaction 100 times worse than what's happening now. It would effectively kill laptop sales. That is how accepted FireWire is in the "Pro" and Mac market as a whole.
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.
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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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?
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?
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.
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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.