Slashdot Mirror
A Brief History of Features Apple Has Killed
Technologizer writes "Some folks are outraged over the lack of FireWire in the new MacBook released this week. But Apple wouldn't be Apple if it didn't move faster than any other computer company to kill technologies that may be past their prime. And history usually validates its decisions. We've posted a decade's worth of examples that prove the point."
They expect them to buy the cheaper computer that still has firewire.
Something besides the MacBook that doesn't have the Firewire port?
There is also a matter of not putting gratuitous features on the machine just to meet the buzz word compliance features. For example, many people complain that the Airport has no firewire port, and I am one of those because some of my kit is firewire only. But given the wireless transfer speeds, 54 Mbits/second, why put a 400 Mbit/sec on it. Sure, if one is using GHz ethernet, it would be nice a FW800 interface, but how many of us do this. And this is the case, perhaps an network aware hard drive is a better solution, which I see are not very expensive.
What is true is that Apple does not waste resources support tech that no longer serves a broad purpose. This means that many of us have closets full of old tech. What this also means is that we don't have to worry about installing drivers every time we put in a USB drive, most cameras work with the standard picture protocol, and if we are willing to pay for the machine, we have external hardware that communicates at fast speeds, built in.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
it's not even the same thing. Firewire provides much faster transfer speeds than USB 2.0--3200 Mbps versus 400 Mbps. 8" floppies were phased out because of the technologically superior 5.25" floppies. and those were subsequently replaced by the 3.5" floppies.
i'm not saying that all computers need a Firewire port, because that's obviously not the case. but having used Firewire compared to USB to transfer large amounts of data, i don't think Firewire should be dismissed so easily.
i'm guessing Firewire has lost out to USB because it's more expensive to implement, whether due to licensing fees or inherent hardware costs, but i would hate to see such a useful technology be killed off just because USB 2.0 is "good enough" for the average user. Firewire makes a huge difference when you're working with audio/video editing, or working with lots of hi-def images or other large files. i would not have thought that Apple would discard a technology that is so vital to their traditional customer base.
Even USB was faster than parallel ports, and RS232, and DVI was better than RGB.
But FireWire was better than SCSI, and nothing touches it yet. The reason that it is a problem that it was gone, is that there is a significant portion of the MacBook population that used FireWire. It will still be used by the higher end macs, but paying 800-1000 for a port is insane. So the choice is to keep using outdated macs, pay TOO much for a port, or go windows.
This is not just an outdated, or soon to be outdated port. This is used, and it is replaced by nothing, and what remains is worse.
This is just a bad idea.
Sorry guys, I know FireWire is faster and cooler than USB 2 (no sarcasm there) and has neat features like the easy peer to peer connection, but USB won the market. Cheap and 'pretty good enough' beats out better and more expensive almost every time. Given that Apple has to put USB on any laptop (leaving that off would really be a disaster), adding FireWire as well just adds to their expense and complexity.
We had this discussion, what, 5 years ago about SCSI? Yeah, IDE/SATA won that one too.
You could argue that the Mac's growing market share itself argues against this, but to me that's just due to sufficient numbers of people thinking Vista isn't 'pretty good enough'. I know some of you love it dearly, but to most people FireWire just doesn't matter. Apple's eventually gonna ditch it, so they've started weaning you off it now.
I strongly suspect that the reason wasn't the cost of adding a firewire port per se. Firewire(albeit in the annoying 4 pin form) shows up on a fair portion of genuinely cheap and awful PC laptops. Firewire addon cards are fairly modestly priced, and Apple clearly wasn't nervous about raising the price of the macbook in order to add the features they wanted.
This seems like a fairly blatant attempt to enforce separation between the macbook and the pro. Now that both are practically identical in build quality and the difference in GPU performance is merely large rather than absolutely enormous, they need a differentiating factor. Firewire seems to have been chosen. I suspect that Apple knows what they are doing, Apple zealots are zealous, most of them will suck it up and pay, and they can use their top of the line construction to sell macbooks to switcher college students. It sure isn't a nice thing to do, though.
I don't think you understand.
A lot of us "outraged" at the omission of FW are mad because of the following reasons:
-digital video (My sister was sold on the capability to import movies of her son and make DVDs and send them to our parents overseas. Big deal for home users interested in this.)
-digital audio (I don't know anything about that, so I can't comment, it seems like a big deal.)
-firewire target disk mode (huge deal for those of us supporting friends and family, even bigger for those of us who have to deploy tens of laptops at the same time. We use firewire drives to slap images on them. If you've never done this you probably don't understand the huge time saving.)
-firewire devices (I've invested in a few FW hard drives because of their power through bus capability, portability and speed, now they're all useless for data storage, time machine, etc.)
There are counter arguments too... .. use time machine, or netrestore, or go se a genius instead of friend-tech support
- digital video, all the HD camcorders supposedly come with USB
- digital audio.. whatever, I don't know
-FW TDM
-firewire devices... SOL
I've successfully "switched" over a dozen friends and family to macs, knowing that in a pinch I could boot into FW TDM and recover their data, or that simply buying an inexpensive external FW disk they could have TimeMachine.
But now, I will not suggest a MacBook for anyone that I may need to support. Especially not for work, where we have over 50 MacBooks deployed. Which is unfortunate, because it really is an excellent machine.
If you don't know what AltaVista is (was), get off my lawn.
Please use real math.
The differences you cite would mean 50 gig of data would take approximately 100 more seconds.
15 minutes and a minute and a half are two different things. Just ask your gf next time YOU'RE done having sex :)
--Toll_Free
That's actually one of the more annoying things they did.
After using real two-button mice for years, I have a habit of having a finger on each button. With the Mighty Mouse, ok, it's cool that it's a touch sensor, but it means I have to lift my left finger to make it a right button.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Steve Jobs and Apple engineers should go to some music studios, movie studios and see why those people demand 12" or 13" laptops.
Let me give a clue to "cheap bastard buy a macbook pro 15" zealots and apologisers. The sound system they plug to firewire port of G4 is way more higher priced than your "pro" laptop.
They actually use the portable at work, to produce something, not to show off at local cafe and the one thing you can't find in studios is SPACE. They are the first ones to move to LCD (sound guys) even while technology and refresh rates were awful.