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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."
The new Macbook doesn't have an 8" floppy?!?!
I won't buy one then, wah, wah, waaaaaaahhhh!
I would love to know what Apple expects basement musicians to use to record multitrack audio. Firewire is way better suited to that and frankly after buying mics, instruments, amps, and mic preamps that group tends not to have an extra $1000 for a computer.
If Apple hadn't invested in so many non-mainstream technologies to start with then they wouldn't have had to kill so many - leaving those machines poor orphans in the process.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
There is always an alternative. This time, Apple is just asking you to give them 700$ more and buy MBP.
Something missing here. The article claims to be "A Brief History of Features Apple Has Killed" Yet, the article has nothing of the sort, and the linked page is a just an opinion piece on the lack of Firewire in the new MacBooks.
I'm guessing this is the link that was intended.
It's not incomprehensible, it's good business sense. The Apple model is make average hardware and very shiny software, then bundle them together with technological safeguards and profit off selling the hardware at 2-3x what other manufacturers charge (for upgardes, initial computers are far more reasonable but there's still the "apple tax")
Apple and MS are about as evil, if anything Apple is worse per unit user. The difference is Apple can make software that doesn't suck in the OS division AND elsewhere.
93rd rule of Slashdot: No matter how obvious my sarcasm is, my comment will be taken seriously by someone.
Why not link directly to the list instead of the pointless poll?
If you look at back and conclude that apple killing features was right because they killed features, that says more about your grasp of logic than whether it was right or merely pushing an agenda.
In this case I can see where they come from, what with eSATA possibly taking over the tasks that USB2/3/... cannot gracefully deal with. That doesn't mean that firewire was inferior technology, far from it. Just that it wasn't loved enough. Which is easy to see when you realise its faults lie in failure to have spawned a large market of dancing gadgets and coffee cup warmers powered by it.
In that respect I am happy to see the outcry. Some people do see its value.
says the article. That's right: 'Hundreds,' not 'tens of thousands.' Get it? The average consumer doesn't give a rip.
How about a moderation of -1 pedantic.
Firewire isn't past its prime. Apple wanted to further differentiate the consumer and pro versions of their laptops, and Steve Jobs' comment about recent consumer camcorders using USB is a reflection f that. Firewire is still used in the professional space for audio and other high-bandwidth data transfer situations where you don't want the CPU bogged down.
A quick web search tells me the cheapest Vista upgrade is $100, while the cheapest Leopard version is $129. This is "2-3x" now?
For a PCI or CardBus ieee1397 card.
For the 99.999% of the rest of us who never had a use for it in the first place, this cumulatively saves a lot more than $50.
The ability to legally run their operating system on something other than their own machines was once an option. Now it is not, for all practical purposes.
Um... rs232 is not nearly dead.
It might not be used much in the world of personal computing but in industry applications it is still king. Along with 422 and 485.
If it is so dead, why do most if not all servers come with it? :-p
Exactly right. It's called technology lock-in, and it often (at least to me) seems pretty arbitrary (the classic examples being modern clocks going clockwise rather than counter-clockwise, and the QWERTY keyboard). "History validating Apple's decisions" of killing technology is rather a weak anthropic principle, rather than any explanatory answer.
I meant hardware upgrades, sorry. I have no knowledge of OS upgrade cost (actually I thought it was free)
93rd rule of Slashdot: No matter how obvious my sarcasm is, my comment will be taken seriously by someone.
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
Seriously ... it's time for it go!
"A Brief History of People Apple Has Killed"?
I thought this was going to be a warning... a warning to us all....
When things get complex, multiply by the complex conjugate.
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.
Except that it makes the extender useless with anything except the Apple keyboard (including the Mighty Mouse), not the other way around.
That's just douchiness. Or they've become so full of themselves that only an Apple keyboard could be so worthy as to use that USB extension cord. I'll normally defend Apple when it's reasonable, but this doesn't make a damn bit of sense and claiming otherwise is going out of your way to be foolish.
Luckily it only applies to people who buy an iMac or Mac Pro. Maybe someday I'll find a use for that stupid extender.
How are sites slashdotted when nobody reads TFAs?
Is there no USB 2.0, which is nearly equal and has the huge advantage of being more mainstream?
The whole article is a troll. I mean "they killed the floppy" that was in the original Mac? Hell they *invented* the scheme that let them store twice as much as PC's did on the same size floppy media. That was great, but now we're all thankful that the floppy is obsolete.
They "killed" nuBus once PCI finally came along and was mainstream. Before that, nuBus, which they invented, kicked @ss over the PC's crappy bus, which was slower and didn't allow for plug-and-play -- you had to move address jumpers on the cards before you installed them.
Back in the day it *was* a pain that Apple hardware was special and more expensive than PC hardware. People complained about lock-in and expense, but it was also often better than the PC hardware of its day. Now it's almost a little sad that Apple isn't the one leading the way on those architectural components, though they still lead on design. (Remember when the G4 came out and it was small and *quiet*? Now you can get a cheap Dell that is small and quiet.)
I have never owned an Apple, but I *am* a fan of their past hardware innovations. Oh, and: Get off my lawn!
Is that $100 for a full copy of Vista that I can install on a bare hard drive?
OS X only comes in 1 form (2 if you count the server version I guess). The only difference is the licencing.
Also, no crippled versions with artificially hobbled media support or networking.
So, when comparing Apples to... Potatos, ensure that you compare feature-comparable stuff.
I'm sure some people are tired of me hating on macs but you know damn well that FireWire was not ready to be dumped. Especially with all that Apple junk that uses FireWire, if I was an Apple fan and had invested money into their gear, I would be uber pissed. Not to mention, as much as I hate to admit it, other that being extremely universal, FireWire is superior to USB in terms of transfer speeds. I just think they should have left it in for a few more generations, or at least until some technology comes around to replace it. Sorry to all you iLovers who can't get enough Apple stuff, I don't hate you, I just find many things about Apple irritating. Nothing personal.
kd and Windbg, the Windows kernel/full-strength debuggers, rely on either serial (yes, RS-232) or Firewire to work. In theory, Vista and above support debugging via USB 2.0, but support seems to be spotty in practice.
I'm sure Apple's primary market isn't people developing drivers for windows, but it is going to make it just a bit harder to debug your stuff on a MacBook if you need to. After all, somebody is going to put boot camp on there and expect things to work. It's going to be a real treat for the dev who has to fix the things that don't.
Apple may be ready to downplay the merits of FireWire, but the Auto Industry, Aerospace, DoD, and much more dealing with high bandwidth control systems and much more are just beginning to implement FW800 with FW3200 next up.
" 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."
No shit, once a large OEM starts refusing to put something on their machines, it tends to have a negative effect on that things continued use in the computer world.
Fair enough, never attribute to malevolence...
93rd rule of Slashdot: No matter how obvious my sarcasm is, my comment will be taken seriously by someone.
Just to pick a nit (I agree with everything else) but Apple didn't invent NuBus, though they were the only ones to actually use it. IIRC, it was invented by TI.
- Apple Computer......proudly going out of business for over twenty years.
They should have replaced it with FW3200. I hope that is still coming soon.
I suggest you read Slashdot
I had to check what a Firewire cable and port look like. Why? Because it's rare. Sure, there are a lot of cameras with a firewire port but USB is just that more prevalent. There isn't a modern computer in the world without a USB port. Seriously, I took this from wikipedia:
"Full support for IEEE 1394a and 1394b is available for Microsoft Windows XP, FreeBSD, Linux[6], Apple Mac OS 8.6 through to Mac OS 9[7], and Mac OS X as well as NetBSD and Haiku. Historically, performance of 1394 devices may have decreased after installing Windows XP Service Pack 2, but were resolved in Hotfix 885222[8] and in SP3. Some FireWire hardware manufacturers also provide custom device drivers which replace the Microsoft OHCI host adapter driver stack, enabling S800-capable devices to run at full 800 Mbit/s transfer rates on older versions of Windows (XP SP2 w/o Hotfix 885222) and Windows Vista. At the time of its release, Microsoft Windows Vista supported only 1394a, with assurances that 1394b support would come in the next service pack.[9] Service Pack 1 for Microsoft Windows Vista has since been released, however the addition of 1394b support is not mentioned anywhere in the release documentation.[10][11][12]"
See? They don't care. Nobody cares. Try that with a USB protocol. There would be total outrage at the fact that there would be no proper USB protocol support.
Now let's look at the back of my computers. Count the number of Firewire ports you see and compare them to USB ports. My computers have 0 or 1 fw ports but they all have 3-5 usb ports on the back alone(not including my usb hub for my golden oldie). Then add some usb in front and you know that it is a widespread standard. And you also must not forget usb sticks and usb external hard drives. The whole world runs on usb(including a usb vacuum cleaner ;) ).
Sure, firewire might be better but it does not matter. Cut the cord and let it die. This year will not be the year of firewire in the desktop.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power lost.
the divot that makes the apple USB keyboard extender cord incompatible with non-apple keyboards is incomprehensible,
As I recall, that was required because of some peculiarity of getting the USB certification.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
* The ability to run programs in the background
* Scripting
And basically everything else that would make a mobile internet device useful.
TI and NeXT used NuBus as well, although NeXT changed the form factor of the cards and ran the bus at a higher clock rate. TI shipped it in their short-lived "Explorer" workstation, which was their version of a Lisp machine.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
If you're doing beefy AV processing yes, you're going to have a MacBook Pro, or a suitable desktop (PC alternatives are available, but this is an Apple thread so I'll stick to Mac).
However, Apple touts iLife as one of the big selling points of Macs, and iMovie 08 is a part of that. MacBooks are more than powerful enough to rip your home movie and chop it about in iMovie to share with family, but without a FireWire port you're going to have an awful time importing video, often having to use an external adapter or some proprietary USB method. FireWire provided a DV standard for getting video off a camcorder, and was part of the 'plug in your camcorder and make a movie' thing which Apple markets to pretty much everybody who buys a Mac.
How many people can read hex if only you and dead people can read hex?
I use my serial port all the time to connect to the console port on network devices (cisco routers, switches, and whatnot) for initial device config, and an analog modem to connect to said routers/switches once they're out in the field and their primary connection (T1 or E1) fails.
Yes, USB-to-Serial converters are commonplace, so I could do away with the serial port, but when a circuit goes down and you need to prove to the ISP that its -not- your equipment at fault, there's literally no substitute for an analog, out-of-band connection.
That's the problem with killing off a technology, there's also a certain fraction of a percentage of users that absolutely must have it. Except for ZIP drives, of course. May they eternally burn in hell, amen..
Most of the time, when Apple deprecates a technology it's because there are legitimate arguments that a superior replacement is available. (And of course, they implement the replacement.) That simply hasn't happened here. USB has its advantages for some scenarios, but there are many more where Firewire is better.
Since this is Apple, there's been no statement about long-term plans anyway. There are a variety of reasons Apple may have left it off this model, even if they don't intend to stop using Firewire in general. Maybe they had trouble making another port fit on the side of the case. Maybe the chipset they got from Nvidia for the MacBooks doesn't include an option for Firewire and they didn't want to do the work to add it on their own. Maybe they're just trying to force some customers to buy MacBook Pros.
Look to the next round of new "consumer"-line Macs for guidance: if new iMacs or minis are released without Firewire, that'll be a very strong signal.
Apple should at least offer an official FW/USB converter/cable or mini-hub, much as they do with the various DisplayPort converters.
Any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.
Fair enough. Wikipedia says MIT developed it and it was first used in a Lisp machine project by an MIT spinoff that TI later bought. But yeah, Apple was the only sizeable commercial deployment, and meanwhile the PC was mired in the backward ISA/extended-ISA/VESA local bus.
From TFA:
...may not pacify folks with camcorders that are FireWire only. Or who like FireWire's speed for external hard drives.
The only thing we've lost is a FireWire 400 port, so against USB 2.0 we haven't lost speed. Both the MacBook Pro and MacBook have lost FireWire 400, but the Pro still has FireWire 800, which the MacBook never had to my knowledge.
I still sympathise with MacBook FireWire users: they don't even have a card slot to fix this omission. The FireWire 800 port on my Pro is heavily used - losing that would be a deal breaker for me.
That's software. It is true that Apple charges ridiculous money for BTO upgrades. If you go with a third-party memory retailer instead of Apple you can easily spend the money Apple wants for a RAM upgrade on the same RAM and a small external hard drive.
Never buy upgrades directly from Apple if avoidable. They do overcharge.
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
head less desktops under $2200 the mac pro stars at $2300 vs $1200+ and up in the g4 and g5 days.
Laptops with video cards that have there own ram under $2000
A real video card in the mini and no putting the 8400m that uses system at $800 will not cut it.
matte displays
ADC
PPC
OS9
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Firewire will most definitely be staying with the pro products. Too many cameras, audio interfaces, disk arrays, etc etc depend on firewire, not to mention .
This is primarily Apple removing a feature that is next to useless on a product for a given audience.
Well, point upgrades are free in both cases, of course.
Also, while Apple does charge a lot for stuff like memory upgrades, there is no need to actually buy from them, you can just buy components of the right specs from anywhere.
No, it's an upgrade of Vista, as the original poster was talking about upgrades. As you point out, Apple doesn't offer upgrade-only versions.
Right, but as you point out, there's no actual need to go to Apple for those things.
There are more USB cameras in use now than there are FireWire cameras. They're called digital cameras. Everyone has them and they virtually all take video.
Additionally, the vast majority of new video camera sales these days use USB. For the consumer, FireWire is a legacy interface.
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.
anybody know if holding down "t" during startup turns the laptop into a usb drive?
mr c
"Physics is like sex. Sure, it may give some practical results, but that's not why we do it." - R. Feynman
Now let's look at the back of my computers. Count the number of Firewire ports you see and compare them to USB ports. My computers have 0 or 1 fw ports but they all have 3-5 usb ports on the back alone(not including my usb hub for my golden oldie).
The number of ports on your computer does not indicate popularity so much as differences in the bus.
Firewire devices can be connected in one long daisy-chain up to 70 devices or so. This means that one or two ports is often enough, theoretically two ports would support 140+ devices (not really advisable if you want to capture a video stream, but you get the idea).
USB, on the other hand, needs a hub to connect multiple devices to a port. I have a passel of both devices, and I run all the firewire drives off one port just to keep the other one convenient, while the usb stuff is a tangle of cables and juggle of ports.
Damn those pesky terrorists
Well I do understand and I sympathize - it sucks to be on the losing end of a standards war. All your stuff no longer works. And it's even worse when the standard that lost is superior from your point of view to the standard that won. But that's just the way it shakes out - I have useless VESA local bus video cards and PCI SCSI cards in a box somewhere. I know exactly how cool FireWire target mode is. I'm just trying to explain why Apple would do this to you, and it boils down to 'FireWire lost, and we (not you) can save money, space, and time by phasing it out'.
Oh, right. 'cause you can use that copy of leopard to install on a machine you built yourself. /sarcasm
EVERY copy of OSX is an upgrade copy. Cause you CANT install it on any computer that didn't already have Mac OS on them. There is no such thing as a full version of OSX because there isn't any such thing as a mac without mac os.
Modding Trolls +1 inciteful since 1999
To paraphrase GI Joe: Knowing is half the purchase. There are enough people who double the price of their new Mac by ordering it pre-upgraded because they never heard of the third-party suppliers.
That's something Macvengelizers have to pay attention to: After you tell people of the BTO offers at the online Apple Store, immediately follow up with "but you can get the memory a lot cheaper by buying it from $REPUTABLE_SUPPLIER".
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
Ahh, to be young...
We old farts never forget the first time seeing a hardcore high-end card reader suck up a four-foot hopper full of cards in less than five seconds, with a noise like ten Shop-Vacs and one Cessna.
Not to jump too much off topic, but your mantra that "cheap and good enough beat expensive and better" is not always true. For proof you don't need to look any further than the Blu-Ray vs. HD DVD battle.
Uh... Apple charges you for their point upgrades. Microsoft does not.
"16MB (fuck off, MiB fascists)" - The Mighty Buzzard
"Nearly equal" to FireWire 400.
The Macbook Pro has FireWire 800, which is pretty much twice as fast.
USB 3.0 will be faster, but it's not out yet. Which means that the fastest peripheral port it has is half what it was in the last Macbooks.
Technically, the gigabit is faster, I suppose...
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
USB 3.0 will be out in another year, and with speeds of 4.8 Gbit/s (600 MB/s) and a new powering system Firewire would have been on its way out anyway.
http://www.engadget.com/2008/01/10/usb-3-0-in-the-flesh/
This is what I keep pointing out to people when we get into the Apple cart. Everyone that loves their Mac is desperately pleading to the world to get on board with them and buy one too. They want that horrible, monopolistic company called Microsoft to go away. Oh, wait a minute. Apple is even more of a monopoly. You must buy their hardware and software. If you don't like their changes, tough luck! This would be the future with Apple. They will make choices and you have none...other than what color of white or silver you want.
jsut athnoer menagiensls ltitle psrhae for you to dcoede. Why do we wtsae our tmie dnoig tihs?
I have never seen a digital camera with good video.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
I occasionally use Firewire to record from my DVR. USB can't do that.
No, I will not work for your startup
NuBus really wasn't much if any better than EISA or MCA, just slightly older.
Plus the cost issues with NuBus caused Apple to spawn a dozen different model-specific "PDS" slots. NuBus slots were only available on the higher end Macs.
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
A bunch of people on here keep saying 'Oh well, USB won the war' but they forget about DV and HDV camcorders. I can't load video from camcorders with USB 2.0, no matter how many wars it wins.
They can't pretend that nobody uses the macbook for video editing...I wouldn't mind so much if they made a 13.3" macbook pro with the proper ports but they aren't doing that.
With the on-location journalistic and documentary work I do, I can't lug a 15" notebook around, it's just not practical.
Until they offer a compact notebook with a firewire port, I'll keep using my old macbook. They'll get their head out of their 4$$ eventually, probably about time I need to upgrade.
Really? 10.5.5 was a free upgrade, as was every other point upgrade from a base OS version.
Can you provide an example?
Or are you one of those people who believe that 10.5 is a point upgrade from 10.4? I'd be surprised if you were, as most of those trolls gave up about five years ago.
I'm happy to give up Firewire, but why not throw on an eSATA port? This seems like the way to go for external hard drives.
IIRC is because the powerbutton found on older Apple keyboards is not USB spec.
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
But if I bought any Mac (that could run OS X) and put a brand new, bought from a white-box HD in there, I could install OS X from that disk and be installing my apps as soon as it was done.
With an upgrade copy of vista, I need a second, full version of Windows before I can install it (either the OEM copy that came with the machine, or some other retail/full copy that I'll need to install first and then get to start installing Vista after that has all been installed.
My point was that, in as far as you can with Apple gear (and yes, you can mix and match when building Macs, especially older rigs like G4 towers, G5 towers etc that you can pick up on ebay or from friends, tweak up with some more memory, HD space, maybe a new graphics card if you're feeling bold and lo, you have a new machine on your hands.
It's not as raw and "hardcorde" as selecting the best motherboard you can find, with the best processor on newegg with the fancy oversized case with the neon lights in it, but it's not really any different.
Whether it's a second hand Mac, or a brand new Mac that has had a virgin hard drive put in it, you're in the same position as if you built a white box PC - you have a machine with no OS on it, barring any original discs that came with it. In the case of ALL boxed copies of OS X (except, I believe a specific one-time-shipped-from-apple-by-special-request-CD of a Panther>Tiger upgrade due to some reason I can't remember) are full copies that will install onto empty drives. So, when comparing to copies of Vista, the price point should be for similar boxed copies of Vista that will install onto a bare drive, not copies that require you have a previous Windows licence/install of some description.
Uh... 10.5 is obviously a point upgrade from 10.4. See the version number? 10 POINT 5, versus 10 POINT 4. By the definition of point upgrade, it is a point upgrade.
"16MB (fuck off, MiB fascists)" - The Mighty Buzzard
All your stuff no longer works.
Really?
(plugs in Firewire drive, watches it mount)
Phew! It still works!
By the way, while Apple dropped Firewire from the main consumer-level laptop, they kept it on every other machine (the 13" MacBook, all MacBook Pros, the Mac Mini, the iMacs and the tower). It doesn't look like they're dumping Firewire to me.
There's no winning or losing in this standards 'war' - Firewire and USB aren't competing for the same market. There's a fair amount of market overlap, but Firewire is targeted at more professional use and USB is targeted at more ubiquitous, consumer use.
There's room enough for both standards here. I can't see why one standard has to 'win' if sometimes the best tool for the job is the other one.
That's a good point - I think it's because Sony gave hundreds of millions of dollars to studios to release movies in Blu-Ray and not HD-DVD (or both instead of just HD-DVD). In that case the 'customers' were the studios, not the end consumers. Apple could probably similarly bring back FireWire by paying manufacturers $5 to put it in every machine built, but obviously they don't care enough to do that (quite the opposite).
-digital audio (I don't know anything about that, so I can't comment, it seems like a big deal.)
This doesn't seem like a case where bandwidth would be an issue -- more that all your existing stuff no longer works, and you need to buy some sort of adapter.
-firewire target disk mode
That's cool, but doesn't seem like _quite_ what you describe...
(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.)
What I don't understand here is why you can't do the same via some other tech. My own preference would be gigabit ethernet (faster than FireWire anyway) and a Linux livecd. You could also build a bootable USB hard drive with an image on it, or boot from the network and do it all that way.
-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.)
That's the part that really sucks -- although the last FireWire disk I saw had a USB cable as well.
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
In a pinch, I'll boot a Linux livecd. This goes for PCs, too.
It's amazing how many people don't realize that this is possible, or that the OS is distinct from the hardware. Just heard of someone getting his hard drive replaced because he got some spyware, which rendered Windows unbootable.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Gah! That horrible keyed usb connector that *only* fits an Apple USB keyboard and no other USB device for no reason whatsoever! I could never understand why they did that, unless it was some sort of "guide" for less experienced computer users so they wouldn't complain about the short USB cord that comes on the keyboard itself.
"Hey look, this plugs into the keyboard only guys! Use it for that!"
The ADC connector, like most of the "consolidate all these cords into one easy thing" connectors was a nice idea in theory, but they soon saw the downsides to that design, and I too, am glad they ditched it for standard DVI connectors.
...they have Firewire(or a ready expansion port) and can run OSX in some form quite easily.
The only mistake Lenovo's made was killing Flexview though.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
Are you telling me the upgrade from Windows 5.0 (aka Windows 2000) to 5.1 (aka XP) to 5.2 (Server 2003) was free?
Lars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck
Do try to apply common sense over obsessive literal-mindedness, and you'll find life much easier.
Macs never had RS-232. They had RS-422.
You do know that you can fix that compatibility issue with a pair of pliers in about half a second, right? Just saying....
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
This is slashdot, are you TRYING to start a flame war here?
Common sense my ass. If Apple wants to fuck with the versioning system that everyone uses and is comfortable with, it's fair game to say they charge for point releases, even if they'd rather you not think of it that way. Their own damn fault for trying to redefine commonly-accepted terms.
"16MB (fuck off, MiB fascists)" - The Mighty Buzzard
So if I have a copy of Windows 95 I can upgrade it to Windows 98, Win 98SE, Win ME for free?
Or if I have Windows 2000, can I get Windows XP for free?
so old peripherals can work on the new Macs/PCs.
Apple switched from ADB to USB to Firewire, but what if you really liked that ADB mouse and keyboard and wanted to use it on a modern Mac or PC?
This happened to the Amiga, the Amiga 1000 had a phone jack keyboard adapter and then the Amiga 2000 had a DIN adapter like the PC-AT. So when my Amiga 1000 keyboard broke I couldn't find a replacement and bought an Amiga 500 instead.
The pinouts for these devices should be all over the Internet, and if someone is business savvy enough they will make adapters for legacy peripherals to be used on modern systems and vice versa.
Imagine that you had a dongle for a 9 pin serial port but your new desktop or laptop has a USB port instead of a 9 pin serial adapter, how can you use your software you bought on your new system? How about that parallel port Dot Matrix impact printer you need to print carbon copy white, yellow, and pink order forms on, but the new PCs and Macs don't have parallel ports?
That serial to USB adapter only gets 9600 baud and it makes communicating with legacy modems and PLC devices very very slow and painful on new systems. Which opens up the market for retrocomputing to use old technology for legacy software that never got upgraded to run on modern systems.
Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.
I mentioned it earlier - I think the keyed USB connector on that cord that makes it exclusive to the USB apple keyboard is to "guide" newbie computer users into lengthening their keyboard cable in some warped way.
I think it's a terrible idea, and should be done away with, but I doubt they'll listen to me.
How many of these USB cameras can handle full HDV video for 60 minutes with cheap, limitless, DV tapes that can be captured onto your computer for easy editing with one cable and one button press?
I'm just trying to explain why Apple would do this to you, and it boils down to 'FireWire lost, and we (not you) can save money, space, and time by phasing it out'.
While I applaud your reasoning, as other have already said it looks like Apple just is trying to differentiate the Macbook and the Macbook pro lines. To accomplish this, they removed a feature on the cheaper notebook that most Mac users have grown familiar and intimate with to offset the cheaper price. They don't have to pay royalty fees to themselves, so it likely would have just costs pennies to add it to the hardware.
I winced a little bit when you said, "it sucks to be on the losing end of a standards war." While USB was likely trying to replace Firewire, Firewire was not trying to replace USB. If Apple would have been trying to do this with their standard, they would have at least released a Firewire mouse or Firewire printer somewhere.
My 2 cents anyway.
Once you start despising the jerks, you become one.
To define "everybody" in a way that does not include Mini-DV camera owners. In the same way, I would define "everybody" not to include BetaMAX users.
Don't worry. Microsoft is planning on transitioning to that model after Windows 7.
Once you start despising the jerks, you become one.
I purchased a digital video camera around 10 months ago. It has FireWire for offloading Video, and USB strictly for snapshots that are located on the SD Card.
For those who don't have the time to read through all the comments, here's the executive summary of what every /. user is saying:
Windows apologists: FireWire's been dead since forever. You shoulda bought a PC.
Apple fanbois: USB2 isn't as good as FireWire. Apple jumped the shark on this one.
Dirty GNU hippies: A plague on both your houses. That's what happens with vendor lock-in.
It's a very dark ride.
Windows 2000 = 5.0.
Windows XP = 5.1.
That wasn't a free upgrade.
It is a matter or an expensive technology being removed because most people do not wish to pay for it.
That may be true but it was nVidia who made the call, not Apple. The 9400M southbridge in the Macbook simply doesn't support firewire.
I suspect Apple simply looked at all its CUDA cores and decided that realtime h.264 for the YouTube set was simply more important than firewire. Yeah, they could have done a discrete firewire implementation but then they're adding cost back in, and Apple isn't going to do discrete anything on the MacBook. Had nVidia supported 1394b, the MacBook would have kept it, but that wasn't a make-or-break feature.
We've heard the story Jobs tells himself to rationalize it, but it simply doesn't hold water in the real world (none of my friends have HD camcorders, though I don't live in Silicon Valley). I suspect Jobs knows the real deal, but they had to make trade-offs, and this was one.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
I can't imagine the damage universal USB3 would do to the industry.
Cheap computer, three USB ports, hi-speed USB drive, cheap USB keyboard.
Hook the keyboard in and the hi-speed drive runs at low data rates.
Do we really think USB3 will fix this tendency of manufacturers to scrimp just because they can?
Keep the specs, connectors, and cables clean.
Computer memory is just fancy paper, CPUs just fancy pens with fancy erasers; the 'net is just a fancy backyard fence.
..and then they are forced to get back-alley firewire cards.
Ah ADB, we hardly knew ya. And how about AppleTalk. A non-routable protocol too. Lovely.
Stupid Docomo phone that runs Linux, has a cable that can hook to USB, but only allows using the phone as a MODEM if the computer is running MSWindows. A properly implemented firewire connection should allow standard IP over firewire.
The really screwed up formats for saving stuff to the SD card might not be relevant here. But, even though you can mount the SD over the cable, you can only usefully access jpeg files from a Mac or Linux box. I can hexdump the files they save the text in, and see the text, but I'm going to have to do some serious reverse engineering to actually access the text in a useful manner.
The holes in the USB standard are probably more important to manufacturers who think they can make money by limiting functionality than the licensing fees.
Are you guys listening?
Let me say it again: I have a stupid USB capable mobile phone. I could, if I chose to buy MSWindows, use the phone tethered. When I asked the salesman whether I could use it tethered with a Linux box or a Mac he looked at me like I must be crazy for trying to use anything but Microsoft. He said (in Japanese), Don't even think about trying to connect the phone to your Mac via USB for anything but charging the battery. (I could tell he wanted to ask me why I would be carrying a Mac portable around on the train or to work or anywhere I might possibly want to use e-mail, besides a Starbucks, maybe.)
There are holes in the USB standard.
If we buy this shift to USB, we are supporting two known monopolists. And we will lose functionality, one standard at a time.
Computer memory is just fancy paper, CPUs just fancy pens with fancy erasers; the 'net is just a fancy backyard fence.
If Apple are willing to upset their customers for intel's sake, why are all their new laptops shipping with Nvidia chipsets?
Firewire 400 and firewire 800 are indeed compatible with the right cable.
The new style macbook pro has an 800 port but not a 400 port (so you need a new cable). The new style macbook doesn't have a firewire port at all (so you're SOL)
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
A Mac Mini used as a router, ethernet to the telco's dongle, Firewire to the local network.
It's true that you may be able (with considerable effort and a few choice Japanese and Korean words of incantation) to do that with a USB port, but you can't do it with standard USB.
Computer memory is just fancy paper, CPUs just fancy pens with fancy erasers; the 'net is just a fancy backyard fence.
I have USB2 drives and my Mac Mini has USB2 ports. But my keyboard kills the speed of the USB ports. Makes it a pain to move large files to USB drives.
Yeah, yeah, you can talk about how the manufacturer is to blame for not have completely separate controllers there.
Better to just keep the pipes separate.
(And, yeah, proposing SCSI as an example for your argument suggests to me that you believe you're happiest when you don't know any better.)
Computer memory is just fancy paper, CPUs just fancy pens with fancy erasers; the 'net is just a fancy backyard fence.
Intel does not charge a "toll" for it's specs like PCI and USB. All of it is free to implement.
Firewire is the one with the royalties.
do you speak French?
Computer memory is just fancy paper, CPUs just fancy pens with fancy erasers; the 'net is just a fancy backyard fence.
Toshiba could have spent every penny they had to bribe every movie studio other than Sony to switch to HD-DVD, but there would still have been a large chunk of media that would never be HD-DVD.
The reverse wasn't true.
A few studios went HD-DVD only in the early days when there wasn't much to be lost from it, but none of them were going to stay that way for long. In the end it was always going to be Blu-Ray unless Sony themselves gave up on the technology, and it would have taken a much bigger difference to get HD-DVD to win.
Of course winning that format war is a rather relative term as it's still not clear that Blu-Ray has actually won, more that HD-DVD has lost.
Apple aren't killing off FireWire, they just not including it in some of their range. And as annoying as that is, it's not the same thing. Technologizer is a moron, end of story.
But cheap and good enough DID win. Upscaled DVD.
Sales records indicate that not many are buying BluRay.
Will it really work?
Computer memory is just fancy paper, CPUs just fancy pens with fancy erasers; the 'net is just a fancy backyard fence.
Just wait.
Computer memory is just fancy paper, CPUs just fancy pens with fancy erasers; the 'net is just a fancy backyard fence.
The original clamshell iBook.
That thing is a pain to load an alternative OS on because of the lack of Firewire.
Computer memory is just fancy paper, CPUs just fancy pens with fancy erasers; the 'net is just a fancy backyard fence.
"USB drives have the added advantage that USB ports are ubiquitous, while Firewire ports aren't. "
I have a SB Audigy with Firewire built in. Just think of how many were sold.
Shai Schticks:"You don't make peace with friends, you make peace with enemies"
Blind leading the blind.
We are the market. We're getting tired of getting screwed by big manufacturer X.
Computer memory is just fancy paper, CPUs just fancy pens with fancy erasers; the 'net is just a fancy backyard fence.
Firewire allows DMA access to all of memory, it was joked that since Apple's come with firewire they're more insecure than PCs. Nobody would seriously recommend removing Firewire for this reason... and yet these laptops have better physical security than the ones before them. Imagine an encrypted HD with a password request on resume... it gets stolen at the coffee shop, the bad guy takes it home being careful to not allow the battery to die. They open the lid, plug into it's firewire and snag the HD keys.
A laptop with sensitive information on it shouldn't have Firewire.
It's just one of the positives of this announcement.
Cwm, fjord-bank glyphs vext quiz
Come on guys the ONLY reason to buy a mac these days is because they look good... And the new macbooks do not look good.
So theres no reason to even buy one of these toys any more! Its all OK!
Dump serial ports AND the entire COM port architecture. That needs to go all that horrible mapping and virtual ports just to connect for example my Phone's USB port to my replicator software. It's already on the USB port - make it a native USB communication already. Having upwards of 10 COM ports is stupid.
Dump LPT ports, all of it, the physical connector and the LPT architecture. Everyone is using a USB printer or a networked print server or a networked MF device.
Dump S-Video. It's crap, it's old and it brings nothing to the table.
Dump dialup modems. If you need one plug it into your USB hub.
Dump PCCard. It's long past its prime. It takes up a slot that never ever gets used on a laptop anymore.
Dump PS/2 mouse & keyboard ports. Waste of space. If you need an external keyboard or trackball go USB or wireless.
New computers don't have any of those things. Have you been to a computer store lately?
Depending on your definition of SCSI, it's either dead or everywhere.
The article goes somewhere in between, saying it's dead, but lives on in iSCSI which is used in some servers.
That's not the half of it.
Parallel interface SCSI (traditionally SCSI) is indeed pretty dead. Drives are rare, interface cards rarer, and if you find one, it's typically overpriced and undercapacity and performance compared to other more current solutions.
But SCSI as a protocol is everywhere. Sure, it's used in iSCSI. But it's also used in ATAPI. ATAPI is the protocol that CD/DVD/BluRay drives talk. Whether carried over parallel ATA or SATA, ATAPI is just SCSI command packets encapsulated in ATA transactions.
It's also used in SBP-2/RBC. SBP-2/RBC is the protocol used to talk to mass storage devices over USB or Firewire. If you are using an external hard drive, you're using SCSI protocol. If you're using an iPod that mounts as a hard drive, you're using SCSI protocol. If you use a USB memory stick, you're using SCSI protocol.
Nearly everyone has one or more devices that use SCSI protocol in their home or office.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
If it's a bare hard drive/new system, you can get OEM for $100. Home Premium too, which is basically the non-hobbled version.
All your base are belong to Wii.
Well, the thing is with OS X you've already bought some Apple hardware, which is really the ultimate form of rights management. With Windows it's a different story since you're not paying Microsoft for the hardware, but the software so they have more of an incentive to charge as much as possible. That said, they should really do away with the retail priced versions of Vista because it doesn't help their case at all, even though (in my opinion at least) no one in their right mind would buy a retail version of Windows since they would either get an upgrade version or OEM.
All your base are belong to Wii.
Really? I bought a camcorder recently and most of the offerings were Firewire. Firewire really works better for video. USB doesn't really have the sustained bandwidth for the job. Digital cameras absolutely suck for video.
As an aside, has anyone else been typing Firefox a lot instead of Firewire in this thread? It's really annoying, but kind of amusing.
All your base are belong to Wii.
Well, Blu-Ray had more backing and I think the PS3 playing Blu-Ray had a large part in its success. Not that many people are going to buy an HD-DVD player just to watch movies, because they probably can't tell the difference, but more people might get a PS3 for gaming and then realize that they've also got a Blu-Ray player and buy some stuff for that. I think there was also a time when Sony was giving away 5 Blu-Ray movies for anyone who bought a PS3, which helps.
All your base are belong to Wii.
A month or so prior to their itunes store launch, a patch mysteriously removed internet streaming for user playlists.
They could easily have designed "fairplay" to simply not allow this feature on protected tracks, but they completely removed it.
My friend used to serve web radio streams to small channels of 30 or fewer from itunes. It took 6 months for something comparable to show up on macupdate.
Then.. there's the utter gutting of imovie.
They dumbed it down to the point that it may as well be integrated into quicktime pro and scratched as a separate app.
Meanwhile, services have arisen which would have made excellent use of the old imovie.
Apple made some token updates and made it available from their site, but it has not been maintained for quite some time, and frequently crashes as you chop an audio clip beyond 30 pieces.
The closest thing that can replace it? Final cut express
200 bucks more for something with more features (and clutter) than you want for basic video editing, or a clone of quicktime pro with a different, more kludgy interface which can't do more than rudimentary splicing for youtube vids.
Thanks apple. The least that could be done is to open source imovie hd 6 since they're clearly not interested in maintaining it anymore, and they don't charge for it on their site.
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
I doubt it-- it was bound to happen sooner or later. USB 2 supports a wide range of low-bandwidth USB 1 devices, as well as high-bandwidth USB 2 devices. This means fewer ports, and that fits quite well with Apple's design goals of making a wide range of seamless, perfectly smooth products, unblemished by things like ports, holes, or buttons.
Information wants to be free.
Entertainment wants to be paid.
You just want to be cheap.
Oh well, I guess you *are* one of those people then.
Think about what "point upgrade" means, and you'll get there. Don't worry that these arguments ended years back. You're new, you can't be expected to know. You'll get there.
I'm no historian, but they both have logical backgrounds. QWERTY keyboards were designed with Typewriters in mind. The layout of the keys had to be spaced so that the arms of the typewriter would not get jammed when typing fast. Nowadays we use it because we always have, and any other layout wouldn't offer a big enough boost in speed to qualify for the change, not to mention that QWERTY is a standard.
As for Clockwise...I'm not positive, but isn't that the way the old sundials "turned"? They just used what they were used to, as there's no good reason to make it go counter-clockwise.
There's always a sensible point at which you kill something off, but "a few years" is pretty ropey, especially when a new HD camera costs something like £600.
Marketing, Smug, Technology, Backlash...
For years Apple takes technology and lets their marketing department transcend the technology into god like status.
When Apple finally admits that the technology wasn't the end all or best, they kill it, move on and users backlash because they believed the Apple marketing and bought not only into the thinking, but the products that surrounded it.
Apple has done this time and time and time again, and will continue to do so as long as Apple Marketing is 'better' than the technology they are shoveling.
Here is just a look back at the bigger ones off the top of my head, where one week Apple users were demonstrating how much better Macs were and the next week when Apple killed them off, had to eat their own smug reality pile:
68xxx, PowerPC, SCSI, System 7,8,9
- Oh, and the importance and power of the 'claimed first' 64bit computer (That still to this day has a 32bit OS, and only offers 64bit memory addressing to applications with none of the other 64bit optimizations that can make a 64bit computer faster.)
(Also don't forget some of the crazy crap, One button mouse is less confusing, keypads are not needed, greyscale displays are 'crisper' and less distracting than full color for DTP, stereo speakers on a notebook are worthless, and other out of nutland arguments to justify the smug insanity.)
So the more Smug the arguments from rabid Mac users are about a 'crappy' or outdated technology, the bigger the backlash when Apple itself moves on.
Mac fans, roll with the punches, it happens to all technology and even Apple technology is mortal. Also, embrace the future, and stop believing Apple's Marketing, instead go read about the technology outside the reality distortion field before you put on your smug smile and 'know' Apple has only given you the 'best'.
And I was hoping the new MacBooks would bring up the stock price. WAH WAH WAH.
Are you saying that you can't push the left and right mouse buttons at the same time
Correct. There's only a single switch (the whole body of the mouse "clicks") - it uses proximity sensors to decide if you're clicking with your left or right finger. If you don't lift your left finger it counts as a left-click. Its probably OK for office work, but to use it in a game and you'll be pwn3d. Oh, and if you knock them into an obstruction on the desk it registers a click. Plus, I hate the shape :-)
...but then, who in their right mind plans on using the mouse that comes bundled with their system when they can stroll into their local PC superstore and pick one that matches your personal preference for size, shape, weight, number of buttons and price? For ages now, any standard 2 button+scroll mouse has worked fine on a Mac, and the main purveyors of button-encrusted monstrosities (Logitech and MS) support Mac (for a given value of "support").
I guess Apple also face a unique problem: they have to produce mice which look cool, but are completely symmetrical. If they shipped a right-handed mouse then the outcry would make Firewiregate look like a drop in the ocean...
In a survey of 100 programmers, 111111 thought that duck-typing was a good idea.
(1) you can get a MBP 15" refurb on the Apple Store website for $1500 with firewire. wait six months and the new gen MBP will have a similar discount. (2) you can pop out the HD from the new MB and put it into a USB enclosure in under a minute. It's not target disk mode, but its functional in a pinch...
Ask Me About... The 80's!
THANK GOD someone knows what they're talking about. There's seriously pure HARDWARE out there that destroys a full-powered MBP with $5,000 worth of software.
Hell, my CELERON 450 with 224 megs of PC-133 and COOLEDIT (Way to fuck it up, Adobe,) and a SBLive! could stomp a macbook pro in audio recording. Good and great musicians can take cheap stuff and get a GREAT SOUND. Crappy musicians can take everything, compress the fuck out of it, and make it LOUD. Ain't no Mac going to fix a lack of basic knowledge.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
Perhaps it was part of deal which Apple finally admits Intel can't really produce GPU? Remove Intel GPU junk which even effects your sales but also remove the firewire which shows their USB2 as a joke.
I think people who are already confused since Firewire has 2 more names at least (i-link, ieee1394) will even get more confused...
Firewire is very well, alive, 1600 and 3200 (REAL) mbit versions are on the way and it is available on Macbook "Pro" and any "Pro" or Desktop stuff Apple produces.
It just doesn't exist on Macbook (amateur?). USB2 didn't get a magical programming genius touch to replace firewire, it still uses CPU and 480mbit claimed speed is a plain lie which I wonder why nobody sued Intel and friends. 4.8 GB promised in USB3 will even use more CPU and it is still raw 4800 which I won't be surprised if it produces lower speeds than FW3200 in real life.
That's because Apple have got the wrong audience. Plenty of people use a MacBook because it's smaller than a MacBook Pro, not because it's cheaper. They would have used a 12" Powerbook before that (a fair number still do, because they're smaller than anything in the current range). It wouldn't be so bad if there was a 13" MacBook Pro which had Firewire, but there isn't, so your only choice now is a 15" or 17" behemoth. I am ignoring the old MacBook which is still on sale, as I expect that will die soon.
Chernobyl 'not a wildlife haven' - BBC News
When "expensive" only means a few extra dollars on a product that costs 100s to 1000s, it's more only a case of "good enough" vs. "better". Apple still won't ditch it for a long time. Perhaps they will restrict it to there "Pro" line, but if you think it's going to get ditched for USB, you are mistaken and don't understand the FireWire specs or market. USB still isn't good enough for some things compared to what FireWire offers. Yeah, it's a niche, but that doesn't mean it's irrelevant.
Ya, PDA's would never have a future.
Sure they are phones now, but just think of the years of sales they lost when Jobs pulled the plug on them, after basically creating the PDA market.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
You didn't lose a feature, you lost it in the low end mac line. You want to talk about vendors killing things, why not look at the list of protocols that Cisco killed with Ethernet?
decnet, appletalk, ATM, FDDI, TokenRing...
Cheap and 'pretty good enough' beats out better and more expensive almost every time.
You're talking about people who are buying Macs over PCs. It's pretty obvious they don't think that way.
If Apple was serious about making it a standard, then they wouldn't have trademarked 'FireWire' and made everyone else call it i1394 and Sony's iLink or whatever. And I know You Ess Bee isn't exactly catchy, it is catchier than i1394.
http://blog.slaingod.com
And so this is how x86 lived for 30 years.
In soviet Russia, God creates you!
Apple killed the FireWire on the MacBooks to keep a definitive edge to the Pro line. Now that there's finally a decent graphics built into the consumer line, and the cosmetics, trackpad and keyboard (backlit) are on the consumer macbook this really sets the dividing line.
Apple has a long history of segmenting their products for marketing reasons (like all companies) and disabling features that may even be built in for mass production economies of scale to segment the market.
Two of the best examples of their douchebaggyness come in QuickTime: Unless you buy the $30 Pro version, you can't save content that others have made freely available on the net, and, until recently, you couldn't view the content in "full screen" without Pro. Blatantly disabling simple must have features to jack off users who've already bought their hardware, their OS, their iLife...and how the hell do you buy an iLife package which is built on the QT frameworks and they don't through those functions in???
I've been using macs since the very first, but am more than ever ready to do OSX86 with a Linux dual boot and try life weaning myself off them as I look to upgrade from my still smooth running PPC machines.
And, BTW, FW for me is important, I've got several externals that are FW based, am not pro by any means...but real world performance on my machines is night and day...better speed than usb 2, and lower cpu usage...no brainer.
And, as I've shopped PC cases and motherboards, the FW is much much more widely available then I thought as I look outside my mac only hardware world to the future. Bad news.
They "killed" nuBus once PCI finally came along and was mainstream. Before that, nuBus, which they invented, kicked @ss over the PC's crappy bus, which was slower and didn't allow for plug-and-play -- you had to move address jumpers on the cards before you installed them.
It's not like the PC didn't have a superior bus to ISA either, IBM had the MCA bus that solved many of the problems with ISA and was even superior to NuBus in some ways (it was faster). However, being a propriety technology with steep licensing fees, it never really caught on as everyone but a few stuck to the free and open ISA bus, so it died a very similar death as NuBus.
Upgrade copies of Windows will also do a full install on a bare harddrive. It'll look for a copy of Windows on the drive to verify that you are eligible for the upgrade, but if it doesn't find it will ask you to insert the install CDs and verify it that way( admittedly, this likely won't work with most recovery disks). Some older versions of Windows Upgrade CDs would do a turn into full install CDs if you knew a "secret" product key to disable the check.
The confusion seems to stem from the fact that with Windows, you have three options: Upgrade, for people with a previous version of Windows, OEM, for computers without Windows where the copy of Windows becomes tied with the physical hardware, and Retail which can install on a blank computer and can be moved to another computer and gets you some additional support options. OSX only has one option, which behaves like the Windows full Retail disk, but in terms of licensing, it's like the Upgrade disk - it can ONLY be used on a computer that originally came with OSX. Since you can't buy a Mac without Mac OS, the OSX upgrade disk can skip the annoying previous OS check - the fact it's an Apple computer is good enough.
It's a ridiculous claim anyway for the article to suggest that PCs still have modems - surely most desktop PCs don't have modems as standard now? Modems have almost always been available via add-on cards rather than the motherboards (I've never actually seen a desktop motherboard that had on-board dial up), so not including them is easy.
Laptops might be different, but as you say, I'd still rather have modem as backup on a laptop, since not everywhere has wifi (or sometimes it's still very expensive or a hassle to get to), than have to buy and lug around an extra piece of hardware, like I'd have to with a Mac.
Alternatively, you could buy one of the hard disk based AVCH cameras and record hours of video without having to swap any tapes.
Jesus was a compassionate social conservative who called individuals to sin no more.
Quit making sense LOL. The whole argument about Apple charging for 'point' upgrades is a dumb argument anyways. If Apple called the upgrade 11 instead of 10.5 would that make these people feel better? One has to look at the features to see if it's a significant upgrade or not (and if you look at the upgrades that Apple, and MS in this case, charge for they are normally pretty significant). The version number of the upgrade doesn't matter!
Sort of. You install it, then install it again to "upgrade" it from itself.
What about the combo-drive (DVD reader/CD burner)? Apple didn't stop shipping that until this week! For the longest time they've insisted on shipping this in their low-end MacBook models, years after DVD burners have been available at reasonable prices.
Apple isn't removing the Firewire port from the MacBooks because they're obsolete. They're removing it because it's now one of the very few things differentiating the MacBook from their more expensive cousin the MacBook Pro!
What about the combo-drive (DVD reader/CD burner)? Apple didn't stop shipping that until this week! For the longest time they've insisted on shipping this in their low-end MacBook models, years after DVD burners have been available at reasonable prices.
This had nothing to do with Firewire being obsolete. Apple's removing it because it's now one of the very few things differentiating the MacBook from their more expensive cousin the MacBook Pro.
Have they given up on the perfectly round mouse yet? That was wonderful. Knowing which way was up was such a drag.
The mighty mouse, what they sell today, is somewhat flat but not circular, your information about Apple mice is about 10 years out of date. :-) They suck too though, the trackball that replaces the scroll wheel on most mice wears out quick.
I can't believe its still Carbon.
The Admin and the Engineer
Is there no USB 2.0, which is nearly equal and has the huge advantage of being more mainstream?
Well, even considering that Firewire 400 is noticeably faster than USB 2.0 it can not be considered to be a replacement until I can take a USB cable, plug one end into my my machine, and the other end into another machine, restart, hold down 'T', and have it appear to the other computer as an external hard drive. An incredibly useful feature if you ever hose the OS.
God save our Queen, and Heaven bless The Maple Leaf Forever!
Three times they pulled the last classic-bootable Mac from the Apple store, and the first two times the outburst was so great they brought yet another iteration of the G4 Powermac back. The third time... less than a year later they announced the Intel switch. I believe that if they'd managed to pull it a year earlier without protests they'd have brought out the Intel macs a year earlier.
Apple pulled audio-in, and brought it back, then dropped it on the Mac mini, and brought it back.
They may bring firewire back, or (better) put expresscard support in the next Macbook, but they'll keep trying.
That's just one more bullet point to add to the heap. Though not being a standard never kept Apple from including original ports before. You know, the kind that would never be found on a non-Macintosh computer.
Once you start despising the jerks, you become one.
Here's the problem. USB 2.0 is only nearly equal.
"Nearly equal" is defined as comparing a moped (FW) to a 2-speed bicycle (USB2).
While USB 2.0 sounds pretty similar to Firewire, the reason it's used by people are pretty well defined.
USB 2.0 maxes out at about 25MB/sec while Firewire-400 maxes out around 40MB/sec when you're using the fastest bridges and chipsets for both and hooking up the same hard drive. While in the maxed out state, USB 2.0 takes 10% of a CPU time. While Firewire takes 1%.
USB 2.0 hardware can't guarantee latency. So when you have good audio equipment, all of them will not use USB 2.0 because audio will get out of sync or even drop a few samples, ruining a recording session.
USB 2.0 is master/slave. A USB master can only switch into slave mode if the hardware supports it, and none of the desktop chipsets do. Nor is it expected that they will. Perhaps Apple might push Intel to make a custom USB chipset, but that most likely breaks all the driver stacks too. This means that the target mode feature people are asking for won't come back.
With stuff like that, sure, it might be worth $1000 for people to buy a MBP, but that doesn't change the fact that they're angry for a good reason.
If we're going with a vehicular analogy, I'd say it's more like comparing a Ferrari (FW) to a Camry (USB2). Because in the vast majority of real-life city and even freeway driving, they are functionally equivalent. But there are rarer legitimate uses where the Ferrari does indeed blow doors and the Camry is pretty useless.
You make some illuminating points about just where and why FW is superior to USB. I bet that if FW had not lost out to USB in the mass market (camcorders in particular), Apple would have kept it in.