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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).
Check out Unsealed: Whispers of Wisdom! http://unsealed.k3rnel.net It's an action-RPG about Open Sourcerers.
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
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.
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.
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?
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.
What does the Robotech Defense Force have to do with this? Are you Rick Hunter in disguise?
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.
"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
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.
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.